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Hello After my upgrade from Linux 9.10 to 10.04 failed and took me a long time to recover all the installed software, i decided to take some time to look at a proper backup procedure.

I was thinking about the following.

I am running on ubuntu 10.04 and I have and external harddrive over the network.

It would be good to write an ISO over the network to my External hardrive every other day or so. But I want it to happen as an automated process. Any idea's how to acieve this?

Are there any good tools for this?

Please consider that it is for private use so please do not suggest costly solutions.


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3 Answers

Simple Backup Suite has a nice gui, does incremental backups, and can run on a schedule.

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Works very well - and it can delete old backups to keep only the numbers of days you want. For example, you schedule it to do 1 full backup per week and incremental backups every other days deleting backups olders than 7 days. –  laurent Aug 15 '10 at 22:47
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You could use rdiff-backup. One advantage of this is that it keeps also old revisions, so if you want let's say the status of one week before you can get it.

Still, given your scenario, I don't think backup is the solution. I mean, if the upgrade failed, what would backup have helped ? You would have had the old system again, and you would need to upgrade again. Reinstalling all the applications took some time, but restoring from backup ALL the system would have been time consuming also.

So, maybe you should use backup just for your data and try to be careful when upgrading the system. If it goes bad, you can always reinstall, it is not that time consuming and you don't do it each month.

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On my Linux box I use backup2l. It's 100% command line based so you can put it in a cronjob. The package in Ubuntu 10.4 comes with a good default configuration so it's easy to set it up and make it work. By default it starts with a full backup and then go with different levels of differential backups. These are all configurable and automatically maintained. So for example you can have:

  • backup.1 = full backup for last month
  • backup.2 = this month full backup
  • backup.21 = delta 1
  • backup.22 = delta 2

Uhm... it's easier to just use it and see what it does. :) Anyway this way you always have at least a full backup, and then smaller sized deltas so the backup data size is kept smaller.

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