We’ve been long-time iDrive users, and when my wife switched to Linux two years ago, we were glad to see that iDrive had Linux support. The fact that it works through scripts and not a desktop app and using the terminal was acceptable, so we did it. Now we’re having problems with it. We’re finding it has not uploaded sections of her files for a while and also at times it’s running processes so much that the fan is running loud. We just learned that it hasn’t backed up for a couple weeks now and is “offline”.
I’d like to know what others have used. I see Icedrive has Linux support. We also have Windows and Mac in our home so we really need one solution for support for all platforms. Any recommendations?
I use a QNAP NAS which provides Windows / Apple Networking / NFS shared folder capability. For us it’s TimeMachine backups to an Apple Networking AFP (Apple File Protocol) share and Linux TimeShift / dump / xfsdump backups to an NFS share. I’m not using the NAS for TimeShift backups yet, that’s being done to local storage on a couple of Linux boxes - for convenience mostly. Other Linux systems are using dump or xfsdump to the NAS.
Why use someone else’s infrastructure when you can have control of your own? Yes, there’s an initial $$ investment for the hardware, but once that’s taken care of it’s pretty smooth sailing.
Interesting. I’m the Mac user so I’m using TimeMachine, and my wife has TimeShift in use, both of us using external USB drives for that. I hadn’t thought of backing up those to an external location. Hmmm…
TimeShift is designed to back up your system files. It can manage your home directory but that is not it’s main purpose. If you need to go back for older user files the default with Timeshift would be to roll back the entire system.
Use rsync to back up your home or a specific directory to an external drive or even a network drive.
Duplicity is a tool that is better suited to backing up user files and is an rsync based GUI.
I was reading tonight about how TimeShift doesn’t do the home dir by default and that “and is not good for backing up your home directory.” according to an author but he doesn’t elaborate why. Narcosis, have you had good luck using TS for a full backup? Are you able to go in and grab individual files out of a TS backup for the home dir? LuckyBackup allows going into the files and grabbing individual files in the backup set.
David, you might also consider looking into using SaveDesktop to capture/backup the config files that neither TimeShift nor Lucky Backup are set to save.
As I understand it, by using all three programs, we’re able to avoid manual restoration of our computer to a previous state in the event of a catastrophe.
I learned about SaveDesktop from Bones’ Telegram channel:
Mainly because, in my limited experience, to restore that picture of Granny you deleted by mistake, requires restoring the entire hard-drive. There may be ways to save a single file/directory out of a timeshift, but I’d take a stab at recovering a file to be sure you know how. That goes for any back-up system. Duplicity is designed to back-up home directories.
