On 12/4/2014 5:03 PM, John Hupp wrote:
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.)
I've wearied myself nicely, studying this issue for some days.
Some interesting nuggets:
Rsync and rather new front end Grsync are both very actively developed.
Dirvish is another front end. Rsync is of course very proven and widely
acclaimed. It is nonetheless a sync tool rather than a backup tool. To
use it for backup, you have to script a workaround that employs hard
links e.g. http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups_2010.html and
you would also have to script something to manage the full and
incremental "backups." Maybe one of the front ends knows how to handle
those chores, but I have not read any mention of it.
Rdiff-backup is a back end that aims to provide mirror + incremental
backup capabilities as part of its native design. Sounds good. But it
doesn't seem to be actively developed, and there are some problems
reported. There have been a couple front end projects, both of which
have been dormant. But the Rdiffweb front end has a new maintainer with
ambitious plans, including a 2015 new release
(http://www.patrikdufresne.com/en/rdiffweb/).
In any case, when you are weary the thought of custom-scripting stuff
(especially for a script weakling) or dealing with a buggy old back end
seems extra daunting. There is extra allure for something that just
works, even if it is slightly off-goal.
So I returned to Copy.com, which I previewed above. It turns out that
you get an extra 5GB just for installing the Linux client, so now my
free allocation is 20GB. That's a lot!
It also turns out that you don't have to actually move your files to the
designated sync folder. Copy supports symlinks, so if in the sync
folder you just create a symlink to your home folder, Copy will pick
that up. Cool!
Furthermore, Copy supports 30-days of file versions and also allows you
to un-delete files. Quasi-backup!
Copy is a product of Barracuda Networks, so though this service is
relatively new, it has good backing.
So for the time being, I'm running with Copy.com.
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