gnome wishlist: one-click backup/restore?

Posted on by Luis Villa

Krissa’s hard drive is dying, beginning the unpleasant process of rsync dump + restore on the new hd. So- is there a one-click backup/restore tool for single-user machines, along the lines of the backup/restore experience in Time Machine. The Ubuntu folks were working on something along these lines but AFAIK there is no actual code there, or at least none productized/shipping widely.

I’ve been successfully using backuppc for intermediate network-based backups, but one-click restore it ain’t.

Published by Luis Villa

17 thoughts on “gnome wishlist: one-click backup/restore?”

  2. Those screenshots scream ‘design by cool hacker features’ instead of ‘design by real-world use cases.’ Hope I’m wrong.

  4. I personally really like Conduit.

    Sadly, Fedora still uses 0.3.11 instead of 0.3.13, but it still works and its quite easy to setup.

    Its not exactly “one click”, but I’d say its about 5 clicks ;)

  5. pybackpack?

    It’s a pretty simple backup interface. It uses rdiff-backup which is probably the only mark against it b/c rdiff-backups callback interface appears to be nonexistent. But it is VERY easy to setup.

    I use it to backup my laptop to my slicehost every night. I just need to get back to work on the auto-backup-nag applet.

  6. It sounds like you want conduit if you are trying to sync across two machines.

    But if you want archival backup/restore you could try pybackpack. It was a GSoC project at one point and is a gui layer over rdiff-backup.

    You’ll note for the record that I have repeatedly opined that an end-user backup facility is the number one piece of functionality that is missing in the default gnome desktop. But i stopped shaking my fist in the air about it once pybackpack was accepted as a GSoC project. We need a tool integrated in the default desktop that encourages users to engage in responsible personal data backup practises.

    Conduit’s project goals really don’t cover archival backups as a stated usage case. It would be groovy if Conduit’s ui could be used to do what pybackpack attempts to do and manage archival rdiff-backup stores as well a syncing bits and pieces.

    -jef

  8. Did you said DrakSnapshot ? :)

    First release of DrakSnapshot (which is a Time-machine like backup system, based on rsnapshot) is part of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. UI is not perfect yet, full restoration from installer and integrated restoration from Nautilus and Dolphin is planned for next Mandriva Linux release (2009), scheduled in october 2008.

  9. “Did you said DrakSnapshot ? :)”

    Ugh, That name alone will kill the project. How about you folks actually name a project nicely and propose it as a generic upstream project instead of specialized distro tools? Red Hat learned this lesson long back.

  10. ZFS is your friend, switch to OpenSolaris and do incremental backups or complete filesystem snapshots with a single command. (There’s a GUI on the way too.)

  11. Those fine chaps, Seth and Jef, have already mentioned pybackpack so I’ll not pimp it further. It does the job, but it ain’t pretty (yet?).

    For GNOME, I think the way forward would be to add the concept of a ‘backup set’ (something like a named list of include and exclude points in the file tree) to nautilus with a framework to allow plugins to be written for nautilus which backup/restore backup sets and report progress.

  12. Actually the code for “HomeUserBackup” is there and functional, I’m using it with satisfaction on one of my.
    In Ubuntu, just apt-get “hubackup” ;)

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