Visit Snapshot City with Back-In-Time

Travel to the Past with with Back-In-Time

Nice GUI and Backup Automation

JD P

Algoloma Systems

About Me - Just some guy

• Backups and Disaster Recovery are my life

Lost 70% personal data in 2000. Never again.

Back-In-Time Checklist

• Automatic & Easy? Yes

• Fast - incremental+? Yes snapshots feel instantaneous

• Efficient - compressed? Maybe hardlinks, no compression

• Secure / encrypted? Perhaps cryptfs, truecrypt

• Versioned / not simple mirror? Yes

• Stored Remotely? Maybe NFS

• Restoration Verified? Yes

+ individual file backups are not incremental.

Simple

• Simple method

• Networking is not build-in, but nfs does work.

• Target filesystem must support hardlinks - No NTFS or FAT16/32/exFAT

How does it work?

• Inspired by TimeMachine

• Tools: Python Rsync / diff / cp

• Back In Time is just a GUI.

• v0.9.26 (current is 1.0.8)

• Hard-link based

• Defaults make snapshots every {hr/day/week/month} Period

• Selectively remove snapshots

• periods can be customized

Hardlinks

Snapshot Removal

Selectively remove snapshots - default method is:

• Retain Hourly snapshots for today & yesterday

• Retain Weekly snapshots for 2 weeks

• Retain Monthly snapshots for a year (last snapshot in a month)

• Retain Yearly snapshots via setting or until manually removed (last snapshot in the year)

• Issue - No daily snapshots are retained since Sunday of this week

Mom's PC - Snapshot Sets

20101231-230001/ - last year

20110131-190001/ - Jan (last snapshot of the month)

20110228-230001/ - Feb

...              - Mar - Aug

20110930-230001/ - Sept

20111009-230001/ - Oct / 2 weeks ago

20111016-230001/ - Oct / 1 week ago

20111022-000001/ - Yesterday - midnight

20111022-010001/ - Snapshot every hour for 2 days

...

20111022-230001/

20111023-000001/

20111023-010001/

...

20111023-110001/

20111023-120001/ - Last snapshot

Mom's PC - Snapshot Sizes

Snapshot Set Sized - du -s *

1853652 20101231-230001  - 1.85G

1322236 20110131-190001

...

509812  20110930-230001  - 510K

374296  20111009-230001

242204  20111016-230001

115468  20111022-000001

5084    20111022-010001

5180    20111022-070001

77868   20111022-080001

5056    20111022-090001

5404    20111023-070001

92968   20111023-080001

3512    20111023-090002

47396   20111023-100001  - 48K

3540    20111023-110001

3548    20111023-120001  - 3.6K

Mom's PC - Snapshot Sizes

Snapshot Set Sizes

• Total Areas in Source Backups is: 7.9GB

• Total Backup Storage used is: 11.3GB

• 53 snapshots in the backup area

Installation - Ubuntu 10.04

• Both Gnome and KDE GUI Versions available

• Ubuntu Packages:

• backintime-common
• backintime-kde
• backintime-gnome

• PPA launchpad.net/~bit-team/+archive/stable

• Tool website: backintime.le-web.org

• Dev website: www.le-web.org/back-in-time/

• Dan dan@le-web.org

Setup

• Probably want to run backups as root

sudo backintime-gnome &

• Work through the Settings

• Pick directories to backup
• Pick where to store backup sets
• Pick what to exclude (caches, devices, special files, HUGE media files)

• Mount the backup media under /backups

• Do not trust automatically mounted /media locations

Setup

Setup

Setup

Setup

Setup

GUI

Crontab

BackInTime created that entry during Setup

$ sudo crontab -l

# m  h  d  m  w

# *  *  *  *  *  command to be executed

@hourly nice -n 19 /usr/bin/backintime --backup-job >/dev/null 2>&1

@daily /root/bin/sw-list.sh  >/dev/null 2>&1

Maintenance

• None really if defaults are accepted

• Self maintaining

• df -k - disk storage; auto remove snapshots for full disks

• df -i - inodes

$ df -i

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on

/dev/sda5            1302528  233403 1069125   18% /

/dev/sdb5            2162688   58147 2104541    3% /backups

Restoration

• All files appear in the backup media under a yyyymmdd-hhmmss/ directory

• Copy the file(s) you want restored

• Simple.

• Perfect for most users - backup that is easy to understand

Advanced Options

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME ( ~/.config )

• User Callbacks in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/backintime/user.callback

RTFM for more info.

Running B-i-T as Root

• Need a few environment variables

• I copied ~/.config/backintime/config to

• /root/.config/backintime/config

• Edit root's crontab

BackInTime Summary

• Suitable where simple backups are needed

• Mom can use

• Easy to setup

• Easy to restore files

• Lacks advanced network support - not what I use personally

Questions?

• email: jdp (at) algoloma [dot] com
• Website: http://algoloma.com
• Blog: http://blog.jdpfu.com