In the Very Good, Very Old days when I used to personally build, sell,
install and maintain my own line of desktop PCs (a mere sideline to my
core business of writing and selling my own cost-control software for the
construction industry) there was a very mean company called-but-not-named
M$ that forced a horrible 16-bit operating system named MS-DOS onto almost
all PC manufacturers in a way that was surely illegal, certainly immoral.
It did not match any of my standards - ethical, functional, quality or
economic - and I was delighted to discover an alternative named DR-DOS,
from the Digital Research company that had provided the CP/M that
controlled so many 8-bit micros. It met all of my standards, and after
that I never sold a PC with MS-DOS preloaded. Just one example of its
superiority: a command called xcopy (eXtended COPY), which did everything
the M$ dupes wished "copy" could do but were forced to turn to Norton
Utilities or similar to perform. It took many years before M$'s miserable
"copy" came anywhere near.
To do a backup with xcopy was simplicity itself because of the
command-line parameters that were available, documented clearly and
on-line in less than 1 Hercules 25-line screen. For 10 years or more that
was all I needed for shifting HDUs-full of files and directories around
with a single command.
Xcopy failed to be updated for a 32-bit, let alone 64-bit, world and
became less and less useful because of its addressing inadequacies. I
moved to OS/2, and found command-line and graphical utilities that worked
quite intuitively and effectively. OS/2 was great, although poisoned in
the marketplace by the Evil Empire. Eventually I could resist the Win32
pressure no longer, and transferred to Window 2000 Server, a fine but
flawed piece of work. Graduated eventually to Win7, all the while keeping
an eye on Linux to see if it was desktop-ready yet. With inexpensive 3G
modems joining sort-of-usable printing via CUPS, I moved slowly into
OpenSuSE, then 'buntus, and am now pretty well settled with Lubuntu and
other Debian derivatives. (And I dabble with a wide variety of other
distros. Distrowatch is a dangerous site!)
And I have not found a single simple way to do the simple thing that was
the mainstay of my file management, for myself and my hundreds of clients,
for more than 2 decades. Oh, I know that in 'nix a file is a much more
complex thing than we DOSsers every imagined. Oh yes, I speed-read
coreutils.info last night, looking for useful hints, all 18627 lines, of
which almost 3000 lines are of index for, pardon me, important concepts
which presumably you should be familiar with before you can select out the
half-dozen you actually want to use. A 3000-concept learning-curve before
you can decide whether and how to use cp (after reading at a guess 7
times as many screens for man cp as for the very-effective help-option for
xcopy), cpio or backup? OK, I guess, if you want to become sysadmin for
a university. But guess what: our DR-DOS tools managed to hide the
potential complexity from us hillbillies very successfully 99.9999% of the
time. Why should we expect anything inferior from Linux, and to be even
more direct, Ubuntu setting its sights on the common users of a wide range
of platforms? Yet more so, Lubuntu which is spreading the domain of Ubuntu
even wider?
At least I learned that what I thought I wanted to do and I gather you
want to do, i.e. to make backups, is not what Linux thinks I want to do.
Nor is a Linux archive what I want to make, although it could be twisted
to get halfway there. And cp may non-obviously be pressed into the
next-door county, but getting it across the border into mine will probably
require writing a shell-script.
I thought about that for maybe 30 seconds (haven't tried bash or Python,
my language of choice is C followed by C++) while I opened up a terminal
and typed "man fc" and nothing was found. Meaning, I think, that there's
an acronym open for implementation of a user-developed command (File
Compare - yes, I know you can get cp to do this) which will be
parametrisable to follow up the comparison (after user intervention, if
needed, in dubious cases) with whatever backup/archiving process has been
pre-planned. May as well put the research done to good use. Maybe it could
even become feasible to pipe stuff through an interface to your favorite
cloud?
Last remark: why don't Linux packagers like acronyms for naming utilities?
(Copy Phile???!!! Goes off muttering to himself...)
All the best for your search, but remember Linux has a different take on
backups.
Basil Fernie
On Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:03:37 +0200, John Hupp <lubu...@prpcompany.com>
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.
:
:
:
Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
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