[Discuss] rsnapshot, "Back In Time"

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I use rsnapshot at home to back up my entire Linux system as well as the
> BLU mail server.

If anyone is looking for the equivalent to rsnapshot for a Linux
desktop, try "Back In Time" (http://backintime.le-web.org/), which is a
GUI wrapper around rsync, and uses the same hard-link approach to create
date-based snapshots. (One of several open source projects inspired by
Apple's Time Machine.)

It's trivially easy to set up. Literally just pick a source and
destination and you're done, unless you want to customize. The Ubuntu
package includes a menu entry for an instance that runs as root, so you
can easily setup an instance that backs up /etc or whatever else you
deem necessary.

If you can spare some free disk space, and don't have something better
in place already, there's no excuse for not installing a super easy tool
like this. Duplicating files on the same disk doesn't buy you a whole
lot, but it's a step better than having only one copy. (I use it to
backup files to a secondary local disk.)

It'll do "fancy" snapshot aging, such as one per day for the past week,
one per week for the past month, one per month for the past 6 months,
and then one per year. (I think the default is something like that. It's
customizable) It'll also prune snapshots when free space is low.

It's really best used as only a part of a larger backup approach or as a
temporary solution. It doesn't support using the rsync protocol over the
network. (You can backup to network mounted drives, of course, but you
give up rsync's network efficiency.) No encryption, compression, or
support for cloud services.

The only significant bug I've spotted is that it is doing something
wrong when it comes to removing files that have been deleted. Instead of
the files only existing in the snapshots taken prior to the deletion,
they exist in all snapshots taken since the file was created and newer.
A bug report exists:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/backintime/+bug/720136

The consequence is that if you needed to do a bulk restore, you'd have
to weed out deleted files. An inconvenience, but no data loss.


> The nice thing about using an rsync-based system is that you have a
> directory that is already in standard Linux format.

That's largely true for "Back In Time" as well, though it does play a
few games to make the file storage more portable to less capable network
file systems. It stores the original permissions for files in a separate
database stored with each snapshot.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/