Incremental backups
The point with these is that they remember what has been backed up during the last run, and back up only what has changed. Great if you back up often.
Rsync-type backups
The main characteristic of this type of backups is that they maintain a copy of the directory you want to keep a backup of, in a traditional "mirror" fashion.
Certain rsync-type packages also do snapshot backups by storing files which describe how the contents of files and folders changed from the last backup (the so-called ‘diffs’). Hence, they are inherently incremental, but usually they do not have compression/encryption. On the other hand, a working copy of everything is immediately available, no decompression/decryption needed. Finally the way it works makes it hard to burn backups to cd/dvd..
CLI
- rsync (in extra repo) — file transfer program to keep remote files in sync
- rsync almost always makes a mirror of the source
- Impossible to restore a full backup before the most recent backup (but you can use –backup to keep old versions of the files)
- Standard install on all distros
- Can run over SSH (port 22) or native rsync protocol (port 873)
- Win32 version available
- rdiff-backup (in community repo) — utility for local/remote mirroring and incremental backups
- Stores most recent backup as regular files
- To revert to older versions, you apply the diff files to recreate the older versions
- It is granularly incremental (delta backup), it only stores changes to a file; will not create a new copy of a file upon change
- Required python and librsync
- Win32 version available
- rsnapshot (in community repo) — remote filesystem snapshot utility
- Does not store diffs, instead it copies entire files if they have changed
- Creates hard links between a series of backed-up trees (snapshots)
- It is differential in that the size of the backup is only the original backup size plus the size of all files that have changed since the last backup.
- Destination filesystem must support hard links
- Requires perl
- Win32 version available
- Safekeep (in AUR) — A client/server backup system which enhances the power of rdiff-backup
- Enhancement to rdiff-backup
- Integrates with Linux LVM and databases to create consistent backups
- Bandwidth throttling
- Link-Backup (from AUR, may be patched with additional features) — similar to rsync based scripts, but does not use rsync
- Creates hard links between a series of backed-up trees (snapshots)
- Intelligently handles renames, moves, and duplicate files without additional storage or transfer
- dstdir/.catalog is a catalog of all unique file instances; backup trees hard-link to the catalog
- Transfer occurs over standard I/O locally or remotely between a client and server instance of this script
- It copies itself to the server; it does not need to be installed on the server
- Requires SSH for remote backups
- It resumes stopped backups; it can even be told to run for n minutes
- Unison — Synchronizes files between two machines over network (Lan or Inet) using smart diff method + rsync, allows one to interactively choose which changes to push, pull, or merge.
- oldtime — A highly customizable and configurable backup & restore system
GUI
- Back In Time (in AUR) — simple backup tool for Linux inspired from “flyback project” and “TimeVault”
- Creates hard links between a series of backed-up trees (snapshots)
- Inspired by FlyBack and TimeVault
- Really is just a front-end to rsync, diff, cp
- A new snapshot is created only if something changed since the last snapshot
- FlyBack (in AUR) — A clone of Apple’s Mac OS X Time Machine software
- Areca Backup (in AUR) — easy to use and reliable backup solution for Linux and Windows
- Written in Java
- Primarily archive-based (ZIP), but will do file-based backup as well
- Delta backup supported (stores only changes)
- Luckybackup (in AUR) — an easy program to backup and sync your files.
- It is written in Qt and C++
- It has Sync,Backup (with include and exclude options),Restore operations,Remote connection backup,Scheduled backups,Command line mode and more abilities.
- syncbackup (in AUR) — Front-end for rsync provides a fast and extraordinarily copying tool. It offers the most common options that control its behavior and permit very flexible specification of the set of files to be copied.
- BackupPC (in community repo) — BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Unix, Linux, WinXX, and MacOSX PCs, desktops and laptops to a server’s disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.
Not rsync-based
They tend to create (big) archive files (like tar.bz2), and (of course) keep track of what’s been archived. Now creating tar.bz2 or tar.gz archives has the advantage that you can extract the backups with just tar/bzip2/gzip, so you do not need to have the backup program around.
- backup-manager (in AUR) — command line backup tool for GNU/Linux, designed to help you make daily archives of your file system. Written in bash and perl, it can make archives and provides lots of interesting features:
- 1 configuration file, 5 minutes setup
- Manually invoke backup process or run daily unattended via CRON
- Backup files, MySQL databases and Subversion repositories
- Specify multiple targets to backup at once (/etc, /home, etc…)
- Ability to exclude files from backup
- Automatically purge old backups
- Full backup only or Full + Incremental backup
- Backup to an attached disk, LAN or Internet
- Burns backup to CD/DVD with MD5 checksum verification
- (Un)compresses archives in all open and arbitrary formats with any command line or GUI tool
- Slice archives to 2 GB if using dar archives format
- Backup over SSH
- Encrypts archives
- Offsite remote upload of archives via FTP, SSH, RSYNC or Amazon S3
- Can run with different configuration files concurrently
- Easy external hooks
- arch-backup (in community repo) — trivial backup scripts with simple configuration:
- compression method can be configured
- possible to specify more directories to backup
- hdup (in AUR) — it’s no longer developed, the author develops rdup now (below); but it’s still a decent one):
- creates tar.gz or tar.bz2 archives
- supports gpg encryption
- supports pushing over ssh
- possible to specify more directories to backup
- rdup (in AUR) — successor to hdup: the program *just determines* which files have changed since the last backup. It’s completely up to you what do you want to do with that list. Some helper scripts are supplied, and with them it supports:
- creating tar.gz archives or rsync-type copy
- encryption (gpg and usual strong (eg. blowfish)), also applies for rsync-type copy
- compression (also for rsync-type copy)
- duplicity — simple command-line utility which allows encrypted compressed incremental backup to nearly any storage. For even simpler usage there are duply and deja-dupfrontends.
- supports gpg encryption and signing
- supports gzip compression
- supports full or incremental backups, incremental backup stores only difference between new and old file
- supports pushing over ftp, ssh/scp, rsync, WebDAV, WebDAVs, HSi and Amazon S3 or local filesystem
- DAR — A full-featured command-line backup tool, short for Disk ARchive
- it uses its own format for archives (so you need to have it around when you want to restore)
- supports splitting backups into more files by size
- makefile-type config files, some custom scripts are available along with it
- supports basic encryption (not gpg; but also strong, but you need to supply a password every time)
- some gui tools for inspecting backups are also available kdar in AUR (but current dar needs beta version)
- a script suitable for running from cron is sarab (in sarab AUR): supports pretty much any backup scheme (Towers of Hanoi, Grandfather-Father-Son, etc..)
- Backerupper (in AUR) — simple program for backing up selected directories over a local network. Its main intended purpose is backing up a user’s personal data.
- GUI based
- creating tar.gz archives
- possible to define : backup frequency, backup time, Max copies
- Manent (in AUR]) — an algorithmically strong backup and archival program. It’s Python based and has the following features:
- Efficient backup to anything that looks like a storage
- Works well over a slow and unreliable network
- Offers online access to the contents of the backup
- Backed up storage is completely encrypted
- Several computers can use the same storage for backup, automatically sharing data
- Not reliant on timestamps of the remote system to detect changes
- Cross-platform support for Unicode file names
- Déjà Dup — a simple GTK+ backup program. It hides the complexity of doing backups the ‘right way’ (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses duplicity as the backend.
- Automatic, timed backup configurable in GUI
- Restore wizard
- Integrated into Nautilus file manager
- Inherits several features of duplicity:
- exclude lists
- SFTP, FTP, samba, WebDAV destinations
- GPG Encryption
Cloud backups
- Crashplan (in AUR) — an online/offsite backup solution
- Unlimited online space for very reasonable pricing.
- Automatic and incremental backups to multiple destinations.
- Intuitive GUI.
- Offers encryption and de-duplication.
- Software is generally free.
- Dropbox (in AUR) — client for the popular file-sharing service
- A daemon monitors a specified directory, and uploads incremental changes to Dropbox.com.
- Changes automatically show up on your other computers.
- Includes file sharing and a public directory.
- You can recover deleted files.
- Community written add-ons.
- Free accounts have 2GB storage.
- http://www.getdropbox.com || nautilus-dropbox – extension for Nautilus, dropbox – without Gnome dependencies
- Jungle Disk (in AUR) — extension for Nautilus
- Automatic backups to Amazon’s servers.
- Not free, but very low prices.
- Tarsnap (in community repo) — secure online backup service for BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin
- Compressed encrypted backups to Amazon S3 Servers
- Automate via cron
- Incremental backups
- Backup any files or directories
- Command line only client
- Very very low prices
- Pay only for usage; bandwidth and storage
- Wuala (in AUR) — secure online storage
- Closed source, free and paid version available.
- Free account holds 5GB, disk space trading has been discontinued.
- Includes file sharing and a public directory.
- Incremental backup and sync are both supported.
- Very convenient GUI.
- Social networking features.
- All files in the cloud are first encrypted locally.
- http://www.wuala.com/ || wuala, wuala-daemon – to run as daemon
- SpiderOak (in AUR) — secure file backup, sync and sharing
- Free and paid version available.
- Free account holds 2GB.
- Includes file sharing and a public directory.
- Incremental backup and sync are both supported.
- Packrat — A simple, modular backup system that uses dar to take full/incremental backups of files and can store them locally, on a remote system via SSH, or on Amazon S3