Simple Backup Solution
By Salvatore Cangeloso
Backing up your data does not have to be hard, tedious, or expensive. This important process can be done with a few simple tools and some good, old-fashioned know-how. The method which we are going to go over today is for POSIX-based (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like) operating systems and leverages an open source application called Simple Backup Solution.
This program, which is available through SourceForge, and was written for Google's Summer of Code, but it will be helpful to lots of people. SBS is a light weight application which makes scheduled backups and also handles partial/full recoveries when they are needed. The tool is a Python script which, despite its small size, has a graphical interface. Its simplicity allows it to run in a number of different architectures and operating systems.
SBS has a number of features. These include:
- Backup any subset of files and directories
- Exclude files and directories by regex expressions
- Exclude files by type (extension)
- Exclude files by maximum file size
- Backup to local filesystem
- Backup to any GnomeVFS supported remote filesystem (including sftp and ftp)
- Full and incremental backups
- Scheduling backups via cron
- Gnome GUI for configuration
- Gnome GUI for restore
- command line restore tool that also provides python API for restoring a file or directory
- Backing up package list in Debian derrived distributions
- On restore, existing files are not overwritten, but are renamed to a safe name
The backups can be saved locally or remotely so long as the target is supported by gnome-vfs. The Gnome GUI interface is there to work with the two GUI tools, one for backup the other for recovery. This tool is actually as simple as it seems- this makes it a great alternative to the number of bloated and expensive backup programs out there. In addition, it is much cheaper and easier to configure than dealing with a hardware-based automatic backup solution.