The Need for Backup Built In
Make Tech Easier recently wrote a guide on setting up a program called SBackup to automatically backup all of your important files to another place. There is no major news with SBackup, but it made me realize the importance of Linux distributions including an easy-to-use GUI application to make backups easy. For technical users, installing the backup solution of their choice is simple and they can choose from terminal tools like rsync or from GUI tools like SBackup, but for less technical users, the kind who are starting to use Linux more and more, who don’t know that they need to go find a backup program, they will only backup if there are graphical tools they can use out of the box to automatically set up their backups.
With Leopard advertising Time Machine and more and more people talking about backups, consumers are starting to realize that their data is not safe. Unless every operating system, Linux and others, makes it easy for them to press a button once and have backups all the time, backups will remain something for the geeks.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:38 am
No backup/restore solution should rely on a GUI. If your GUI is hosed, your restore is far from starting.
Use afio from the command line to create them. mkisofs to create the iso, then cdrecord to burn to CD-ROM. For more, learn to mirror/rsync/…, or learn tape drives. Or scp.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:54 am
There are several quite good commercial backup solutions for linux and unix - like IBM Tivoli (which is largely a crossplatform application, built on Java) and others, but there at least should be some free graphical utility, which manages some command-line backup utility options, thus creating a compromise, if your GUI will crash, you will still have your backups.
December 9th, 2007 at 11:12 am
S. Keeling has a point: the restore needs to be dependent on very little. But that does not invalidate the original argument: backups need to be as simple as possible.
Perhaps the best backup software takes advantage of the GUI to whetever extent is necessary to make the backup simple, and the restore can be a text-based GUI or a wizard which walks the person through the restoring process?
December 9th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Any backup solution for the consumer needs to be GUI driven. Any OS so fragile that its GUI breaks is NOT fit for the consumer. Besides, there is the GUI piece the user sets up the backup with, and then there is the back end that just does the backups. I am describing Time Machine, friends. Apple has set the standard for user friendly backups.
December 9th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
On Mandriva there is a nice easy to GUI based backup application called drakbackup. See http://expert.mandriva.com/question/77786 for an explanation, and http://linux.techteam.gr/docs/mandrake/9.2/drakbackup.html for a description of the GUI.
December 9th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Whatsamatta slow blogging day? Needed to grab some headlines did ya? That’ll do it - just throw ‘Apple’ in there and voila! I don’t see how Apple has anything to do with this at all.
Most Linux users have known all along that backups are crucial. We don’t rely on someone else to wipe our fanny for us.
There are several GUI based backup utilities for Linux (released LONG before Time Machine). Here are a couple:
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/dkop/
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
But built in?? Both sbackup & backuppc are available from Debian via an amazing tool called apt-get and since there is no ‘default’ Debian installation all you need do is apt-get it.
If you must have something that reminds you of Time Machine have a look at Flyback
http://code.google.com/p/flyback/
Just because it comes from Apple does not automatically make it the best it simply means that Apple says it is.
Would you care to know how Time Machine ain’t all that and a bag of chips?
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/110507gaskin.html
December 9th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
The problem is finding something big enough to back up to!
If I have a terabyte of movies and music, I need another terabyte to back it up to. And if I had another terabyte I’d be more likely ot fill it with new movies and music than to use it as backup.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
NickRout - I know what you are talking about! Backing up hours of HD video from my camcorder is impossible!!!
mzilikazi - First, as I said, I am aware that there are plenty of tools for advanced users, but you can’t ignore less technical users who will not bother to backup unless it is easy. As for why I included Apple, Leopard is the first operating system to advertise an easy way to backup. You may or may not think Time Machine is any good, but the reality is the Apple is good at marketing and so people are going to start being more aware of the need for backups, which increases the pressure on Linux to make it -easy- to backup.
tracyanne - I have not played with Mandriva a lot recently. It is good to see that at least some distros are including backup software.
S. Keeling, Anonymous, and John Bloomers - I think as far as the user is concerned, they do not care if the program making the backup is a terminal based app or a GUI app, as long as they can configure it through a GUI. That said, I agree that if the GUI of any OS is not stable enough to support a backup app, there is a problem.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
January 6th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Hello Guru, I fell blessed that I found your post while searching for backup solutions. I agree with you on the subject The Need for Backup Built In. I was just thinking about this matter last Sunday.
February 10th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I think Bacula is a great product http://bacula.org a pain to setup but once working very nice. Linux is still not ready for the average home user there still needs to be more in the way of GUI tools for things such as backup and when will linux get some good financial/tax software. I like to keep up with the latest version of Quicken and Quikbooks so Wine is out of the question so I run them in a XP VM. XP in VMWare works fine for most things but others like Photoshop and Maya need a dedicated machine/video