[Hidden-tech] Back Up software?

[Jonathan Dill]

Two more free "sync" utilities which I have used successfully which work 
on Windows and Linux / Unix and between different platforms.

Unison
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

JFileSync
http://jfilesync.sourceforge.net/

The universal caveat for all of these sync utilities is to be very 
careful if you use the "delete" option--You may want to try a "dry run" 
or "test" mode if available to see what would be deleted before you 
actually do it.

Rich wrote:
> AND I found that backuppc actually uses rsync as the PC side of the 
> process, and includes a daemon version (read service for Windows admins),
> so it can be run pretty much independent of the notebook user 
> remembering to run it.
There are 2 little "hiccups" to deal with, 1 with respect to backing up 
Windows, and 1 with respect to backing up laptops that aren't "always 
connected" to the network.  There is information in the FAQ and in the 
mailing list archives for how to deal with these issues.

1. getting your "exclude" patterns right for rsync e.g. you want to 
exclude user.dat, hiberfile.sys, pagefile.sys, things that are either 
typically "locked" by the system, or that will just waste space for this 
type of a backup.

2. some people have reported problems getting laptops to back up at the 
"right time" especially if they are not on the network every day, but 
there are some tricks to deal with that, also you should be able to 
"force" it to do a full or incr backup "on demand" through the web interface

On the Linux side of things, the default package install of BackupPC for 
Debian and Ubuntu is set up to backup /etc "out of the box" which is 
very nice to keep an essentially indefinite history of system 
configuration files.  I always include that as part of my "base install" 
now even if something other than backuppc will be used to do the actual 
backups.  This can be a life saver if you discover something isn't 
working because you changed something in /etc but you forgot what you 
did and forgot to make a record of the change.

Jonathan