Back In Time is a simple free backup tool for Linux. The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories. “Back In Time” in real terms is a nice GUI that holds and stears the most common unix/linux commands to performs backups for you. “Back In Time” has got a nice GUI which works well both for GNOME & KDE (KDE4 and higher)
At the heart of the system is
“Rsync” performing snapshots and restores
“diff” checks for changes
“cp” command does the obvivous, copying (creates hardlnk for files not changed)
“cron” takes care of the scheduled backup jobs
“Back In Time” performs a backup only when there was a change to a file or a directory. Anything that remains unchanges will be created with a Hardlink from the snapshot to the actual file. So, in essence, even if you have setup a schedule to perform a backup on a selected directory, any file not changed since the last backup would simply be created with a hardlink to the original file saving precious disk space. Another nice feature is the option to have schedules for individual directories included in the include list.
Install “Back In Time” in openSUSE
Click this oneclick1-click installer hosted by packman to install BIT on openSUSE 11.1/11.0/10.3
This should download the YMP file and automatically launch the YaST package manager to add the required Repositories, download and install BIT and the dependencies. Click next on the BIT installation screen and Next again on the installation proposal window. This should start adding the required repositories, download and install BIT and its required dependencies. Click Finish when the installation completes successfully.
This should install Back In Time under “Applications – System – Backup“.
When you launch BIT for the first time, you will be given the settings window to set the backup directories, the files and folders to exclude (Regex supported), the snapshot folder, schedule, housekeeping options for the older snapshots etc.
There is a nice detailed documentation from the author at the project home. Click here to visit the project home.
Thanks for the above – only problem is that when I set this up, I must be missing something.
On my OpenSuse 11.0 system, after setting up according to the instructions, I run a backup and everything seems to finish fine: folders are created but there doesn’t seem to be anything in them reflecting the source.
As it happens, I have access to an Ubuntu 9.04 system as well, so I set up “Back In Time” on that as well and tried a similar operation. Not only do the folders get set up but they are populated correctly. I can restore files from them with no problem. Same version, 0.9.26.
As far as I can tell, all is as it should be on SuSe. I am not a big Linux expert but I have been looking for a simple but reliable back-up tool so that I can make a good backup prior to upgrading Suse. It would be ironic if there’s something I need from that to make it BackInTime work properly in 11.0 !
But if anybody has any clue what’s going on here, I’d be grateful to hear from you. Thanks.
Reler