How to Use 'Back In Time' Backup Software for Linux

Robbie Ferguson: The software, the GUI that I want to look at tonight is called Back in Time. This is available from le-web.org. I’ve looked at so many different pieces of software for Linux for doing my backups. I’ve looked at various different things that you know try to be what Time Machine is to Mac OS and haven’t been happy with any of them until I found Back in Time. Back in Time is a great little GUI and it’s of course, free for Linux users. So on this page, you see a link that says Download. It’s couple different download options. The first one is your deb installer package and then you’ve got src package, the tar.gz. We don’t want to use any of those because what happens if they bring out a new version. We’ve got to go back to this website. We’ve got to download the new version, we’ve got to remove the old version, reinstall this version or upgrade to the new version. It gets a little complicated. We want to use what’s called a repository. So just scrolling down the page just a little bit, you’ll see that there are repositories available for both Ubuntu Hardy and Ubuntu Intrepid and I’m sorry if you’re using something other than Ubuntu but we are using Ubuntu tonight. So this is the demonstration that I’m giving. However, if you are using a different operating system, of course you could compile from source. So I am just going to copy that Intrepid, URL here. I’ll just double click on it. I am going to copy that and we’re going to add this to our sources.list file which is basically our repository. Let’s do this through a GUI, make it really simple for you. This is the program that holds all your repositories. I have gone up to System Administration, Software Sources, enter your password and now we’re going to go up to Third-Party software at the top here and create a new—we’re going to click add and we’re just going to Ctrl V or you can also write right click and go paste and Ctrl V as your paste key and then Add Source. So then we can close that and just close, we don’t need to reload here because we’re going to actually do that from the command line. So then click on Applications, Accessories, Terminal and first thing we’re going to do as I was saying, sudo apt-get update. Enter your password and then this is going to get the repository information for everything. Next step, we’ve done sudo apt-get update, just double click on this and then—or triple click and then hit Ctrl C to copy or again, right click and hit copy, this is just going to give you a quick access to installing these programs or you can type that of course in your Terminal. So now we want to just hit Alt E, see that Carrie? I’m pushing Alt E, we talked about that I think last week. 0 Carrie Webb: Oh yeah. Robbie Ferguson: For edit and then P for paste and enter and that’s going to add that line, it’s pasted that line that I copied from my web browser and then just hit enter. We don’t have to enter our password this time because we already did. Now I already installed this just to save time, so how awesome is that? So, let’s bring up the program for the first time; Applications, System Tools, Back in Time. So the first thing it’s asking us is where do you want to save these snapshots, it’s going to default to your home folder which is not a good place to save your backups because you’re probably going to want to backup that folder. So we’re going to hit other and we’re going to go into your home folder and we’re going create a new folder, Create Folder and then we’ll call this Backup, okay. Go up to that folder, highlight it, go into it or whatever and hit Open and that’s going to set your folder to backup. Now we need to create an exclusion so that the system does not try to backup that folder because it’s already the backup. So I’ve set /home/robbie/backup. We want to add that as an exclude. Carrie Webb: So, the one that you’re excluding right now, is that going to be like your foundation? Like you we’re saying— Robbie Ferguson: That’s going to be where we store our backups, this could be an external drive. If it’s an external drive, of course connect the drive first and just make sure it’s connected every time you want to run your backup and one error that I just noticed; you need to be aware of this too, remember when I created that folder? I created it with a capital B and here I created an exclusion with a small b. The next is case sensitive, so you need to be very careful of that home/robbie/Backup. So we need to include that capital B. So now what we want to do is add our backup directories. I’m just going to be really, really quick about it. We don’t want to add specifically our home folder. I would add like Documents, Add, okay, Music, Add, just kind of like that Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So very, very straightforward and then if you want to create automatic snapshots, you can make it do it every hour, every day, every week every month, very, very straight forward. Carrie Webb: Okay, so that—what you just—what you’ve done right now— Robbie Ferguson: Okay. Carrie Webb: That’s what you’re talking about by doing online backups? Robbie Ferguson: This is—we’re just doing locally because remember Carries, we set our ware to save snapshots to a local folder. Of course because of the way Linux works, ingenious thing is, is that you could make a mount point in your computer, mount and ssh drive which is like a computer somewhere else. It could be through the internet, it could be NAS storage drive; Network Attached Storage. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So in that, you would just tell it to save to that folder which is actually a mount point for some other type of media, whether it would be online or whether it be, whatever. Carrie Webb: So that’s offsite backup because you’re sending it somewhere, right? Robbie Ferguson: It could be. You can save it anywhere you like but if you wan to use an offsite backup in this case, you would have to create a mount point in Linux and that’s mount point would become to this program, it would think it’s just a folder on your computer. Carrie Webb: And it’s actually— Robbie Ferguson: But it’s actually a drive somewhere, it could be another computer in the house, it could be something halfway across the road. Carrie Webb: That’s amazing. Robbie Ferguson: It’s very cool. Carrie Webb: Yeah. Robbie Ferguson: And it makes it easy to grab files from it too. So I’m just going proceed with that, I’ve just set all those things pretty basic and just hit OK and yeah, so that’s—I don’t have any music to backup which is one of the folders—oh Mick Rippon song is there. So that’s cool. So once that is done, you can hit, Take snapshot if you like and that’s going to run your first ever snapshot and you’ll see a little icon that appears up there and I think that’s already done. Yeah. So now I’ve got my timeline now includes the snapshot that I just took and keep in mind like this is not a super fast computer that I’m using that’s already done, that’s not very—didn’t take long at all. So the next time that I run a snapshot, it’s going to compare the contents of this backup to now and you’ll notice now it’s done but it didn’t create a new backup because nothing new was created during this time. So let’s say I just go into—let’s just go into my Music folder. I’m going to create a new file or new folder, rename that folder, whatever. Within that folder I’ll create a new file and within that file, let’s just put some text, all right. So we’ll save that file, this is within my backup path. So now, next time I run t that backup, it’s going to automatically detect that there is a new file and it’s going to create a backup in my timeline. So now you’ll see that this backup contains all of the files that I had. However, its also got, let’s see, that’s the one. It’s also got my new Hi folder and if I go into that folder, I can bring up my test file and it will actually load it. It will actually open it, you can preview files just by double clicking on them or whatever. So, then at the same time Carrie, if I want, I can bring up my places and go into that folder that I created for my backups, so go into my folder and go into Backup. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: And you’ll actually see—oh! I accidentally changed that to save it to my videos folder; that was a mistake. Carrie Webb: Oh that’s—that’s— Robbie Ferguson: Tat you don’t want to accidentally do. See what I did? I guess I clicked on it at the last second when I zoomed in. I tend to do weird things when I’m zoomed in, so let’s pretend that was Backups folder, that’s why my backups were showing as empty. If I go into videos now, you’ll see a folder called backintime. Carrie Webb: It’s the lack of glasses so we can blame on that. Robbie Ferguson: It’s the lack of glasses and it’s also, when I’m zoomed in, I tend to accidentally drag something and not realize because the mouse kind of loses a bit of its control. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So, what can you do? So you see these two backups now that I’ve created and you’ll notice that each backup contains everything. So Documents see? So, I go back to the other back up and it also contains every thing. But here’s what’s neat Carrie, let’s go right back to the root here of my backups. And I’m going to right click on the first backup. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: And go Properties, this is what I was talking about, look at the size, 2.8 MB okay? Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: Now close that the and I’ll bring up the properties for this one. Carrie Webb: When you just need. Robbie Ferguson: The second backup. The second backup is also 2.8 MB because the text file was like new, right? Carrie Webb: Right. Robbie Ferguson: So you would expect that that means that the combined total of these two would be like 6. something GB. Carrie Webb: Right. Robbie Ferguson: Right. If I highlight both of those and go Properties, it’s going to add up the files, so we now have 44 files—oh let’s see here. I’m going to go up one folder because I know that’s confusing. And I click—right click on the backintime folder which contains both of those folders. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: And you’ll see a 46 items which is twice you know, let’s every file but it still—it only takes 2.8 MG on my drive it self. So even though we’ve got what we see as an exact copy of every single file for every single backup because of those hard links, it saves a substantial amount of space in my computer. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So that is Back in Time; really, really straightforward. I don’t even need to get into a lot of you know setup and things like that because it is just absolutely simple to setup the GUI but check that out. We will post the link to Back in Time on our website category5.tv and a show notes for Episode #69 after tonight show. Carrie Webb: I see.