Ubuntu Tips n Tricks

7 (More) Best Free/Open-source Backup Software for Linux

Posted: 26 May 2010 01:08 AM PDT

Before, we have featured here some of the best Free and Open Soure backup software for Linux. As I've already explained, a backup software is essential for recovering important files when disaster happens. Since there are still several excellent free and open source backup software that I failed to mention the last time, I decided to once again gather another list of some of the best backup software that are available for Linux.

BackupPC
BackupPC is a Disk-to-disk backup software suite that is considered as one of the most popular free and open-source backup software. It has a web-based frontend with no need for client as the server is itself a client for several protocols, which are handled by other services native to the client OS. BackupPC is using a combination of hard links to reduce the total disk space utilized for files. During the first full backup, each and every file is transferred to the backend, optionally compressed, and then compared. All similar files are hard linked and use only one additional directory entry.

Areca Backup
Areca Backup is a personal file backup software written in Java. It includes a backup engine, along with a graphical user interface and a command-line interface. It has been designed to be as simple as possible to set up with no complex configuration files to edit. It is also flexible since it can use advanced backup modes (like "delta backup") or simply produce a "basic" copy of your source files as a standard directory or zip archive (readable by WinZip or other archivers). Areca Backup will also allow you to interact with your archives and the files they contain. You can track different versions of a specific file, browse your archives, recover or view specific files, and merge a set of archives.

DirSync Pro
DirSync Pro (Directory Synchronize Pro) as described from its project website is a small, but powerful utility for file and folder synchronization. It can be used to synchronize the content of one or many folders recursively. DirSync Pro offers a graphical user interface from which the user can manage and run multiple synchronization tasks, and you can also use it via the command line that makes it very flexible for running in batches. It supports local folder to folder synchronization, but does not allow synchronization via FTP. DirSync Pro is self-contained within its own directory, and is therefore fully portable.

luckyBackup

luckyBackup is a fast and reliable free backup application that has a graphical user interface (GUI) based on the cross platform Qt libraries and is not fundamentally console based or web based as many of the clients from the list of backup software are. Its GUI is already translated in many languages and is notable for its availability directly from the repositories of all major Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, openSuse, Fedora, Mandriva, Arch, Slackware, and Gentoo. luckyBackup shares the data differencing and copying tool, rsync, with BackupPC, rdiff-backup, and several others.

Partimage
Partimage is a free and open-source disk backup software. It can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Using Partimage, partitions can be saved across the network using the Partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS (Network File Systems). This provides the capability to perform a hard disk partition recovery after a disk crash. Aside from running as part of your normal system, Partimage can be loaded as a stand-alone from the live SystemRescueCd, which is helpful when the operating system cannot be started. SystemRescueCd is packed with data recovery software for Linux that you may need.

Mondo Rescue
Mondo Rescue is a reliable free disaster recovery solution. It backs up your Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R(W), DVD+R(W), NFS or hard disk partition. Mondo Rescue supports several filesystems including LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT, and can support additional filesystems easily. It also offers support for software raid as well as most hardware raid controllers. Mondo runs on all major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, and Gentoo. However, you can use it to backup non-Linux partitions like NTFS if needed.

tar

tar is a file archiver that is designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive; however, it is also common to write a tarfile to a normal file. Originally created to be written directly to sequential I/O devices for tape backup purposes, it is now primarily used to collect many files into one larger file for distribution or archiving, while preserving file system information such as user and group permissions, dates, and directory structures.