Top 7 Ubuntu Desktop Backup Software

As you already know, it is very critical to take backup of your system on an on-going basis.

If you are using Ubuntu desktop, depending on your requirement, you can use any one of the following software to perform backup. Play around with these and pick the one that satisfies your need.

1. Pybackpack

This has a very simple and intutive user interface. This has the following two tabs:

• Backup: Specify the backupset name, and the backup destination. You can also specify a remote server where the backup can be stored via SSH. From the backup tab, you can also launch the backupset editor, where you can specify the backupset name, description, the files and folders that needs to be included or excluded from the backup.
• Restore: Select the backup location from where you like to restore, and the backupset name.

# apt-cache search pyback
pybackpack - user friendly file backup tool for GNOME

# sudo apt-get install pybackpack

# pybackpack

Read more: Backup Your Files/Folders on Ubuntu Desktop using Pybackpack GUI Tool

2. Sbackup

sbackup stands for simple backup. When you launch this software, it has the following tabs:

• General
• Include: Specify the list of folders or files that needs to be included in the backup.
• Exclude: Specify the list of folders or files that needs to be excluded from the backup. You can also exclude based on file types (for example: Exclude all *.mp3 from backup), regular expressions, and maximum file size.
• Destination: Specify where the backup needs to be stored. This also provides the option to store the backup at a remote site using SSH or FTP.
• Schedule: Indicate how often you want to schedule the backup and when. You can schedule both full and incremental backups. If you are familiar with crontab, you can also specify the time in cron format.
• Purging: You can purge backups that are older than certain number of days from the system using this tab.
• Report
• Using the simple backup restoration wizard, you can pick any of the previous incremental or full backup, and do a restore either selectively or full.

Read more: How to Backup Ubuntu Desktop Using sbackup Simple Backup GNOME Tool

3. Backerupper

Backerupper is a straight forward backup program that takes backup of the directories that you specify. Apart from placing the backup on the system, you can also copy the backup to some other location on your local network.

Do the following to get backerupper started.

# wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/project/backerupper/backerupper/Backerupper-0.24/backerupper-0.24-32.tar.gz

# tar xvfz backerupper-0.24-32.tar.gz
# cd backerupper-0.24-32/
# ./install.sh

# backer

The following are some of the features of backerupper:

• When it is not backing-up data, it runs in the background, and can be accessed from the icon in the system tray
• Ability to create multiple profiles. For example, you can create a profile to backup all media files (mp3, videos, etc.), and another profile to backup data only.
• Ability to schedule the backup (this doesn’t use cron). You can also take backup immediately using “Backup Now” feature.
• The backups are really taken using the tar command and stored as .tar.gz format

4. Rsync

rsync is a command line utility that is the basics of most of the GUI based backup tool mentioned here.

rsync utility is used to synchronize the files and directories from one location to another in an effective way. Backup location could be on local server or on remote server. It is fast, secure, and uses less bandwidth.

The following three article will explain you everything you need to know about rsync:

• 15 rsync command examples
• How to exclude files and folders during rsync
• Setup rsync over ssh

5. Rdiff-backup

rdiff-backup does remote incremental backup of your system effectively. This combines two powerful backup concepts–mirroring and incremental backup. First, it takes the full copy of the specified folder to the remote server. The extra reverse diffs are stored under a subdirectory in the remote system, which helps you to recover files from earlier.

You need to install rdiff-backup on both local and remote system. The following example will backup the content of /home/ramesh from local server to the remote server. Like we mentioned earlier, it does both the mirroring and incremental backup.

rdiff-backup /home/ramesh ramesh@remotehost::/backup/ramesh

rdiff-backup works on both binary file and text files, and during incremental backup, it takes only the portion of the data that are changed. This uses the librsync, which uses the similar diffing algorithm as rsync.

The following are some of the key features of rdiff-backup:

• Easy to use command line utility
• Implements both mirroring and incremental backups
• It saves space (and bandwidth) during backup process
• Apart from Linux, it works on Mac OS X also

6. Grsync

grsync stands for GUI for rsync. It uses GTK libraries for the UI. Apart from Linux, this also works on Windows and Mac OS X.

You create a session that contains a set of files and folders that needs to be backed-up. A session is just like a backupset.

grsync has the following three tabs:

• Basic Options: You can set several rsync flags. For example: Preserve time, owner, permission and group. Delete on destination, ignore existing, skip newer, etc.
• Advanced Options: This contains several additional rsync options. For example: Always checksum, compress file data, Only update existing files, Keep partially transferred files, Copy hardlinks as hardlinks, etc.,
• Extra Options: Additional rsync options.

7. Rsnapshot

rsnapshot uses the combination of rsync and hard links to maintain full-backup and incremental backups. Once you’ve setup and configured rsnapshot, there is absolutely no maintenance involved in it. rsnapshot will automatically take care of deleting and rotating the old backups.

It also takes very less disk space. The first full backup will take the same size as your original files and directories. Subsequent rsnapshot full backups takes only less space, as it takes backup of only the modified files from the previous full backup.

For more information, read how to backup local Linux host, and remote linux host using rsnapshot utility.