I want to create a backup of my Linux system, including user files, from the command line. I tried using Timeshift but it doesn’t have a CLI argument to include a folder.

I found a guide on dev.to that explains how to use Timeshift from the command line, but it doesn’t mention how to include user files. According to ItsFOSS, Timeshift is designed to protect system files and settings, not user data, so user home directories are excluded by default.

I came across a list of backup programs for Linux on Slant, and BackInTime appears to be the best.

Has anyone used BackInTime to backup the whole system including user files? Are there any other tools that you would recommend?

Edit: would also be nice if it had similar features to Timeshift, like incremental snapshots, weekly snapshots, list, restore and delete snapshots, etc.

  • tal@lemmy.today
    2·
    11 months ago

    Then u can just use gpg on your rsync backups ?

    Yes, if you wanted to implement encryption, you could do it using gpg. That’s what duplicity does.

    If you wanted to try implementing deltas for incrementals yourself in shell, I guess you could try doing so using xdelta, though I have no idea whether it’s possible to make it reasonable on performance for this kind of workload. It’s just that, I mean, all of this stuff takes time and testing, and people have already built backup systems atop rsync in the form of rsnapshot or rdiff-backup or duplicity and such.

    I’ve got nothing against rsync. I use it to replicate file trees all the time, and it’s fine for what it was built for. It’s just that as a tool, it’s aimed at generating a replicated filetree…but generally, backups can benefit from more than just a replicated tree of files.

    I’m not specifically-saying that rdiff-backup is the end-all be-all backup system, just that it’s what I’ve found to be useful, and that I’m familiar with rsync. If it kept an index of hashes of files, it could dedup whole files and make renames-space-efficient, which would be kind of nice. If it retained copies of inode numbers, it could be used to cheaply-detect renames. There are algorithms to detect non-aligned duplicate chunks, which could cram the size down further. It needs a filesystem as the target, not a blob store, the way it looks like restic+rclone can, and for some users – like, say they want to use Amazon S3 storage as their backing storage to get offsite storage – might make sense. It can’t leverage information stored in something like btrfs to rapidly-detect that a file has changed; like rsync, it can use mtime as a quick check, without hashing the file. It isn’t (itself) designed for things like backing up live SQL databases. But for my use case, and I think for most people, it probably covers the stuff that they’re gonna want in a backup tool.