Linux - Backup software / commands

Jagera

I was a fairly regular user of xcopy before making the switch to Linux recently, and have yet to find a replacement.

Basically I want to routinely copy any new/updated files onto a external USB every now & then. xcopy was good for this.

I can't seem to find any software or commands which will do this, other than just cp - can anyone point me in the right direction here?

Using Linux Mint 8.

Khannie

rsync? I'm not familiar with xcopy though.

Orion

xcopy is just a copy command with a few extra switches. In windows robocopy is the king.

But anyway - as Khannie said - rsync is the command you want. Just type "man rsync" in a terminal for the help page.

DESCRIPTION
       Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file  copying  tool.   It
       can  copy  locally,  to/from  another  host  over  any remote shell, or
       to/from a remote rsync daemon.  It offers a  large  number  of  options
       that  control  every  aspect  of  its behavior and permit very flexible
       specification of the set of files to be copied.

pljudge321

If you want a more GUI based backup program this is quite good and very easy to set up.

Simple Backup Suite

bnt

I'm a big fan of Unison, which I use for all kinds of stuff. Not just storage devices, I even managed to get it to sync from Linux to Windows over SSH/SCP. It does true 2-way sync, you can add, update or delete files on either side.

If you try it, the GTK front end makes it easy to use, but it's highly scriptable too. There are tricks to make it work more smoothly with VFAT devices, such as the "pretendwin" switch, and the "fastcheck" switch speeds it up.

Khannie

Oh, I just came across this the other day. I installed it but it requires a non-boot drive for the backup which I don't currently have available.

Jagera

bugger, bugger. bugger

I downloaded a little GUI for rsync and did a test backup. All worked fine, I then moved onto the real backup (moving files from an NTFS partition to an external HDD)

Unfortunately one of the options selected by default was to delete files on destination. Despite pickign this up in my test, I forgot it on the real run, & I've now deleted a load of files from my HDD.

So, onto recovery. I looked at ntfsundelete which looks perfect, except my HDD is FAT. I've had a look around but if there's any tried & tested stuff I'd like to hear.

next time, I'm sticking to the command line.

Jagera

I did some more searching & as I wanted to get this done asap, I looked into "forefront". I was good and picked up 70,000 deleted files, before I had to stop it as I was running out of disk space.

KAGY

+1 for Unison, I like the way you can reference profiles from profiles, so you can have a lot of common stuff like bnt's fastcheck in one profile and the paths etc in another.

bnt

KAGY wrote: »

+1 for Unison, I like the way you can reference profiles from profiles, so you can have a lot of common stuff like bnt's fastcheck in one profile and the paths etc in another.

Ooh - I didn't know that, I've just been making profiles as standard.

PS: I should mention, for anyone interested, that getting the SSH method to work to Windows required that I install Cygwin on Windows, with the Unison and SSHD packages. The SSH server requires some additional configuration steps, documented here. You could also export the Windows Share and mount it on Linux, but I gave the SSH method a go and it works really well. The difference is that this way Unison runs on both sides of the link, and each side checks/indexes its local files: no transferring big files across the network for checking, just because a time stamp changed.

CompFix

"dd" is another great tool for backing up data, along with a host of other features thrown in. It's command line based.

Naikon

Rsync + Tar is your friend.