I often worry about my PC at work — it’s about 3 or 4 years old now and I’ve already crashed it twice by running Ubuntu updates and not letting them finish. Luckily I have my home drive mounted as a separate partition so reinstalling the OS isn’t a huge inconvenience aside from having to reinstall all my apps.
After doing some googling I came across SBackup, which is a simple backup program to back up whatever on your system to wherever you want to keep your backups — without having to configure a script.
First, install sbackup via apt-get, yum, or whatever other package manager you use:
$ sudo apt-get install sbackup
Then open the backup manager under System > Administration > Simple Backup Config
Now, I used the custom backup settings because I didn’t want to back up everything on my system — all I’m concerned about is everything in my home directory, such as my Documents, email, and porn browser settings. To select what you want backed up, go to the Include tab and Add Directory or Add File to include files and folders in your backups.
Naturally there are some files within your selected folders that you don’t want to back up, like your trash and cache. You can add those under the Exclude tab.
Next set your timing — I did ‘precisely’ every day at 5pm when I won’t be here to experience the extreme lag of my 14G home directory being tarred up. As for the Purging options, I chose Logarithmic so that I don’t have old backups that I don’t need — I only need the backups in case my PC crashes and I lose everything, so I don’t care about backups from two weeks ago.
The destination part is where you want your backups to go. The default is /var/backup, but if your PC crashes, that isn’t going to be very convenient for you. Therefore one of the two options should be the one you go with:
- Custom local directory: If you have a floppy disk (which I pray you do not) or a USB drive, you can usually find those in the /media directory and have those mounted to copy your backups
- Remote directory: If you have FTP or SSH access to a remote server, you can have your backups uploaded. The syntax is simple:
ssh://user:password@serverip:/remote/dir
After you have everything configured, save your settings and hit Backup Now! to run a test and make sure everything is working.