I'm still working on a solution for the problems I raised in the thread
"A survey of GUI-based free online backup."
I have swung this way and that looking for the best approach. Time and
again, I have found something that is promising in one regard but
undesirable in another.
Here is where I am right now.
Copy.com offers 15GB of free storage with a Linux client, but the client
is really just a sync program, and you have to place all your files in a
designated folder. If you want to preserve your default user profile
folders, you could backup all your user files to the designated sync folder.
Box.com offers 10GB of free storage. They don't have a Linux client,
but they do support WebDAV. So you then need either a backup program
that supports WebDAV, or you can use davfs2 to map a local drive to the
WebDAV resource, and back up to the mapped drive. In either case you
need a backup program.
So with either Copy.com or Box.com, the backup program is a critical
ingredient.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes on a couple of promising backup programs:
Duplicity (say, with front end Deja Dup) has lots of strengths, but a
full backup should be run periodically, and you really don't want to do
that because of the difficulty of a multi-GB upload.
Duplicity -- why a periodic full backup? See
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Cloud-Backup-with-Duplicity,
where it says:
/Thus, in principle, you could just create one full backup and then
use incremental backups for the changes. The developers of Duplicity
warn customers, however: Not only can a mistake in one incremental
part ruin the entire backup, but restoring files takes quite a long
time if the software needs to run through all the incremental backups/.
Duplicati 2 (based on Duplicity) overcomes that problem with an approach
that reliably merges 256KB diffs into an existing full backup. The
256KB chunk size keeps uploads reasonable. It supports Google Drive, MS
Onedrive, and other destinations. But the Linux version requires
installing Mono, which can run the Duplicati C# code that also runs on
.NET Framework under Windows. This is convenient for a small project to
extend its platform reach, but it seems to me that it introduces
security risks, since .NET Framework malware does exist.
This may be an impossible spec, but I'd like to find a backup program that:
- will run in Lubuntu without installing a load of dependencies for
another environment
- has a GUI (perhaps largely for the sake of Restores by average users)
- doesn't require a periodic full backup
- supports good encryption
- supports compression
- supports breaking the backup into nicely uploadable small chunks
- is not buggy
- preferably does auto-deletion of older backups, or supports
versioning, or will send an email when a backup fails
If that is an impossible spec in the current state of affairs, I'd like
opinions on the best compromises.
(I've been using SpiderOak, which has a nice Linux client and 2GB of
free storage, but that's not much storage these days, and I'd like to
hit on a better free solution that I can set up on systems that I put
together for people.)
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