Making backups simpler
Linux.com is running an article on easy automated backups with a new program called sbackup. Sbackup is a product of Google’s summer of code and is a GUI to pick and choose what to backup and when to routinely back it up. Apparently the project was also sponsored by Ubuntu. (I’d expect integration into their distro’s admin tools if not already then.)
I’ve usually stuck with mondoarchive for routine backup to media, or unison for synchronizing data sets across a couple machines (effectively mirroring your data which gives redundancy which is the goal of a backup anyway.) But, it’s great to see new interfaces that make it even easier. That’s one of the obstacles for new users, finding an EASY way to routinely backup their data. Fortunately Linux makes this easy by keeping all user data in /home/
(Now that I think about it, I’ve also done some scripts to backup a home directory and archive using tar and bzip (with find to look for new files for an incremental version.) But, that’s not the kind of thing you’d expect joe user to set up.
The article does note that it’s not a replacement for something like mondorescue. Still it’s nice to see more, simple ways of doing it.