4 Linux Backup Utilities You Can Use

[@Practical-IT]

These are all great for quick and easy backups. I tend to use RClone to make my offsite backups. It's a pretty powerful utility, and runs on basically any OS you can think of.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

rclone is more akin to rsync than an actual backup utility. It will let you make files sync but, say, if a file is incorrectly overwritten in the source for whatever reason, it will be also overwritten in the destination when rclone do its thing. Tools like borg and restic provide file versioning, which protects you from that scenario.

[@JohnPMiller]

It's a good idea to have at least two backups of your critical data. Pika Pika!😀

[@middle_pickup]

That's cute.

[@mx338]

I like that this a list of applications you actually used, not just some listing of linux backup software that you just quickly checked out for this video.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Don, also be sure to check out Back in Time (has both Qt and GTK front-ends) and the KDE built-in backup tool that can be found in the System Settings based on bup that takes a very git-like approach for its file versioning.

[@bernym4047]

Well explained, no fluff. Thanks.

[@败蹬牌防弹盔甲]

btw, "restic" is good for incremental and encrypted backup

[@KeithWeston]

Restic is almost overkill for smaller homelabs, but, yeah, it's a good product.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Both borg and restic descend from the same codebase and offer pretty much the same backup features. The only major difference between the two is that restic is very flexible as to what will be used as backend for the backup itself, supporting many popular cloud storage services. That said, borg seems to be the most stable between the two; you can find some awful horror stories online with people losing data to restic although, to be honest, it has been very stable for me so far.

[@Darkk6969]

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 I've personally never had an issue with restic. Although, it would be nice to have a GUI to manage the snapshots. Yes I know I can mount them but still.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

@@Darkk6969 That's my biggest peeve with restic: the lack of decent GUI front-ends such as Pika Backup and Vorta. Even duplicity has decent options for GUI. While restic itself is not hard to drive from the CLI, it may be hard just enough to discourage newbies from using it which is a shame.

[@Zimbob2424]

thanks, this is what I need. I've been doing it manually for awhile now since I started 3d printing. don't want to lose all those drawings.

[@CGA111]

Vorta has an option to run a missed backup at startup which I think is essential. Otherwise, if your computer happens to be turned off when the scheduled backup is supposed to run, it won't run until the next scheduled time.

[@gamingoutloud293]

Nice video :). After a long journey, I decided to perform root backups of my Linux systems (backup everything on system level). Everything is set up as VMs on an ESXi system, and then I execute incremental scheduled backups via Veeam, which also runs as a VM and backs up itself.

[@ADB-zf5zr]

@NovaspiritTech @6:23 you talk about "KBackup" and then say "it's more of a glorified copy and paste". Well there is a Windows app that has been around for many years (that I use and love) called "Karens Backup" that is also a "glorified copy and paste" (which is THE reason why I love it). This "KBackup" does NOT do the same thing as "Karens Backup (which is why i love it) because instead of creating a huge compressed file (that could be corrupted causing a huge amount of headaches), Karens Backup copies the files and folder structure as is. So no compression, no zip files, no encryption, and therefore far less to go wrong if you need to recover, BUT this has obvious drawbacks and it always overwrites existing files so you cant go back a couple of file versions. An excellent tool IMHO, and seemingly nothing like KBackup.

[@MattMcCullough]

I recommend time shift

[@DavidDavisL]

Will take a look at Pika. Keep in mind that if you have Proxmox Backup Server running, that can be a good option, too.

[@1hakika]

There is also a Déjà Dup that uses duplicity as a backend

[@timfd.w.4163]

This one and Vorta are the best I have tried. This one is a bit friendlier althoug Vorta is nerdier

[@dragonballjiujitsu]

I like KBackup because it is just like a copy and paste. Simple and effective. I use that with time shift daily.

[@luigitech3169]

Have you tried to do some benchmarks ? I tried and Kopia seems to be the best in different scenarios

[@MarcosMoraleda]

rear backup is awesome.

[@KeithWeston]

I'm using Pika on Pop! OS and Vorta on Linux Mint. Due to a flatpak incompatibility, Pika does not work (out of the box) with LM. Vorta does. And, since they produce compatible results... Thanks for your good summary.

[@sebastiangonzales46]

thanks!! pika doesn't work properly on mint due to outdated xdg desktop dependency. I will try vorta for now

[@donaldwilliams6821]

Pika Backup works very well for me

[@middle_pickup]

New to Linux. What's the right way to backup a system with a fully restorable boot drive? I'm used to using Backblaze for files, and Macrium Reflect, or Paragon for my Windows boot disk. I see that Pika will be great for important individual files, but it doesn't do full boot disks, right?

[@llortaton2834]

You should make a video on Proxmox Backup Server again, but on the client side (Proxmox Backup Client Daemon). It is one of the most efficient, fast, sleek system i have ever seen for backing up your linux hosts

[@llortaton2834]

You can even backup windows with WSL

[@therealfirstone]

MX Linux Snapshot makes a bootable/installable clone copy with just a few clicks.

[@ChrisGuerin-p8t]

Can Pika do a full PC backup of different computers? What would you recommend to do full backup of PC to a NAS

[@ronm6585]

Thanks Don.

[@MrDeviousdom]

I installed Pika, for the life of me I cannot figure out how to import a backup in order to restore it. If I make a copy of the backup folder, I cannot find a way to import it (in the event of a system failure). Am I missing something?

[@lwa.dev74]

thank you :-)

[@MrEric377]

Thank you!!!

[@julian.morgan]

what would you use to clone an entire boot volume? For example I have a desktop PC running Pop OS in my office that I've spent hours setting up, with two different users, downloading and installing apps and games relevant to each user. I'd like to duplicate that set up on another PC without having to do all the set up again. Is this possible or even a good idea with Linux? I'm thinking there could be all kinds of problems with permissions and UUIDs of drives for example.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

You can create an image of your entire Linux system or just selected partitions using Clonezilla (or Rescuezilla for a more "graphical" approach) but that's typically better suited for a backup tool to restore on the same system where the image was taken from due to, as you already guessed, UUIDs and other hardware-specific tidbits. One could also use the _btrfs send_ functionality in BTRFS to save filesystem snapshots onto a diffferent btrfs system but I guess that would also imply in having conflicting hardware setup info being carried on with the snapshot as well. Personally, if the goal is to replicate the settings of an existing system onto another, I am really fond of a Debian tool called apt-clone. It creates a tarball that has not only package information of the system to be cloned but also /etc settings wherever applicable that can be used to replicate the setup on a different machine using apt-clone itself. But obviously, as the name implies, it will only work on Debian and its derivatives.

[@motoryzen]

Foxclone is a much more user friendly alternative to clonezilla...

[@StraussBR]

I use timeshift And i backup system files i have a script that does a backup applies latest updates and reboots the PC because i like to update my system manuall whenever i want to reboot it

[@KeithWeston]

I used to use TimeShift, but since it does not dedup, boy, does it take up precious hard disk space.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Timeshift does filesystem snapshots which is not exactly the same thing as a backup per se. Yes, there are situations where snapshots are handy to recover data quickly but it is important to keep that distinction in mind. Plus if you are saving snapshots in the same storage medium as the original data, you might as well pretend you don't have any backup at all.

[@Darkk6969]

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 snapshots only works with btfrs disks. Most installs I've run across lately are using ext4. btfrs are very efficient with snapshots.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

@@KeithWeston Timeshift is actually very space-efficient when using btrfs but if you are using with an ext4 filesystem then your only resort is rsync and welp... rsync-based snapshots eat storage space like there is no tomorrow, indeed.

[@G-3-A-R-Z]

The question I have are how many use rsync as a dependency.

[@daniel156161]

Pika Backup looks like a Frontend for BorgBackup Backup Folder Structure looks very same

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

You are not wrong. Pika Backup is a front-end for borg. Being a GNOME app, it takes a simpler approach from an UI perspective but it is just as capable as Vorta (which is another borg front-end and happens to be my favorite).

[@Broly_1]

You don't what to know what pika means in PTBR😂