About
Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux inspired from “flyback project” and “TimeVault”. The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories.
Up to 1.0.40 there was two GUI available: Gnome and KDE 4 (>= 4.1).
Starting with 1.1.0 there only one QT GUI.
All you have to do is configure:
- Where to save snapshot
- What directories to backup
- When backup should be done (manual, every hour, every day, every week, every month)
Some informations are outdated: you can also check https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/wiki
Why did I write the application ? When I read about Apple’s TimeMachine I thought it’s nice tool to have. I searched for equivalent applications for Linux and I find TimeValut and FlyBack. I didn’t feel very comfortable with TimeVault, especialy with it’s timeline. FlyBack was almost what I was looking for: I wanted a Places/Bookmarks column and I wanted snapshots only when something changed (just to reduce the number of snapshots).
Keep in mind that Back In Time is just a GUI. The real magic is done by rsync (take snapshots and restore), diff (check if somethind changed) and cp (make hardlinks).
Back In Time acts as a “user mode” backup system. This means that you can backup/restore only folders you have write access to (actually you can backup read-only folders, but you can’t restore them).
If you want to run it as root you need to use “su” (command line), “gksu” (Gnome) or “kdesudo” (KDE).
A new snapshot is created only if something changed since the last snapshot (if any).
A snapshot contains all the files from the selected directories (except for exclude patterns). In order to reduce disk space it use hard-links (if possible) between snapshots for unchanged files. This way a file of 10Mb, unchanged for 10 snapshots, will use only 10Mb on the disk.
When you restore a file ‘A’, if it already exists on the file system it will be renamed to ‘A.backup.<current data>’.
For automatic backup it use “cron” so there is no need for a daemon, but “cron” must be running.
Starting from version 0.9.24 permissions and user/group are stored in a special file. This way you can even save/restore files from a NTFS/FAT drive without losing this informations (NOTE: FAT don’t support hard-links).
Screenshots
Gnome
| Main Window | Settings Dialog | Snapshots Dialog |
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KDE4
| Main Window | Settings Dialog | Snapshots Dialog |
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Download
Sources
https://github.com/bit-team/backintime
Old code (obsolete):
https://code.launchpad.net/~bit-team/backintime/trunk
Tarball:
Ubuntu repository
https://launchpad.net/~bit-team/+archive/stable
Ubuntu testing repository
https://launchpad.net/~bit-team/+archive/testing
Fedora repository
Back In Time was included into Fedora repositories.
Mandriva repository
Thanks to volunteers Back In Time was packaged for Mandriva.
AhmedShimi 