More Powerful Backup Solution?

[Xplorer4x4]

I am on Precise but going to possibly upgrade here very shortly to Quantal. I don't think it matters, but just in case...

Anyways, I tried luckybackup, BackinTime, and KBackup. They all seems alright, but they all seem to lack in terms of compression settings/information if you compare it to Arconis True Image Home. In TIH, you were able to set levels of compression and the program would tell you an estimate of how much space your back up file will take up. It would even tell you an estimate as to how long the job will take to complete and counts down as the task progresses. Is there anything comparable for Kubuntu/linux? I guess what I need is more of an imaging program per say? I want to compress the data, but still be able to extract individual files out of it if need be.

[claydoh]

From what I have looked at in the past, simply learning to set the right switches in rsync is the way to go for advanced setups; you should be able to search for many examples that may help. Most of these gui backup tools are simply using rsync for everything.



http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20...03/Backup.html
some more links you may find useful.

[james147]

Personally if I need a compressed backups I use tar though I don't tend to compress my backups.

Instead I tend to rdiff-backup, it uses the rsync protocol for file transfer, but stores a history of changes to the files (basically stores a snapshot of the files each time you run it). I find this saves allot more space then compression if the data you backup doesn't change hugely each time you backup and you want to keep historic information about the files.

Unfortunately it doesn't give any more information about progress then rsync does (but incremental updates don't tend to take very long compared to full disk backups).

Afraid I don't really use GUI programs for backing up (I find command line far more flexible for this task) so cannot suggest any to try. If you give us more info about what/how you are/want to backup then we can better suggest the right tools/methods for the job.

[Xplorer4x4]

Sorry for the lack of details. This evening is not turning out as planned thanks to a site source code upgrade causing problems. Anyways, I have 2 hard drives dieing. 1 for Music and one for Movies, 3D Models and other junk for a game mod. I do not access it very often at all. Now the Music HDD sees pretty much daily use and growth. My new 3TB is just not big enough to hold both hard drives contents simultaneously. At least in a non-compressed state. This 3TB will only be used to hold the back up until I can afford another 3TB or Christmas, which ever one comes first lol.

I tried looking in to some of the gui tools in that link claydoh, but for some reason none of those 4 seems to give me a gui. Maybe I missed a gui package that is separate. Not really sure..

I guess I could use cli, I just have to much on my plate atm to spend all the time exploring what options are going to do what. Normally I am anxious to research and learn, just not so much at this time.

[james147]

Unfortunately movies and music are already in a compressed state so go not compress again very much. How much over is the data on the combined failing drives?

[Xplorer4x4]

Unfortunately movies and music are already in a compressed state so go not compress again very much. How much over is the data on the combined failing drives?

I am not sure on the overage. I realize dealing with avi, mp4, and mkv are already compressed data format, but when dealing with something like Acronis, it really does not matter what the content is. I am not sure if it compresses the data or the image or both, and I can't give any hard facts. I just know what I have experienced. I can try it in a win vm, or win dual boot if I really have to but not sure a vm will work in this case and didnt want to dual boot(yet-was planning to wait on my Intel 330 SSD).

Sent from my DROID2 Global

[james147]

My point was that they won't be compressed much further by any compressing program. So you might not save the space required to fit on the new drive.

If you need reduce the space allot then I do not think compression will help much if at all, and it would take along time to compress that much data. That is assuming most of the data is movies and music.

Feel free to try, but you may be disappointed with the results.

You can use ark to create compressed files with ease.

[Xplorer4x4]

While this is not quite an ideal comparison, I am dual booting Win 8 now(for gaming needs), and installed Acronis True Image Home 2013. My Win 8 partition is using 38.5GB. I ran a back up with full compression and it estimated the back up would be about 20 GB in size.

Now for a direct comparison, using the exact same set of data I wanted to back up(plus more) is now 2115.5 GB/2.07 TB and the estimated back up size using full compression is 1.1 TB. That's an almost 50% reduction in data size.

As you said, Ark is probably not going to achieve these type of results using standard compression algorithms(maybe not even using more obscure compression algorithms). That is the very reason I inquired about a more powerful solution then lucky. Typing this from Win 8 I do not have access to Ark at the moment, but as best as I recall Ark does not give an estimate as to the estimated outcome of the archive. Plus Arconis actually estimates the time needed to perform the task. Something luckybackup and others seem to lack.

[dmeyer]

You mentioned a harddrive image. Well I use "dd" for much of my back-ups. Here is a great tutorial that I can recommend: http://mark.koli.ch/2009/05/howto-wh...and-p7zip.html

Again, no GUI but still pretty darn powerful. You can use whatever compression method you want but for the time-size trade off I think stick to gzip. Also, pigz (parallel gzip) speeds the process up a ton.

[bweinel]

You mentioned a harddrive image. Well I use "dd" for much of my back-ups.

"dd" is my first choice as well for full image backups. rsync is great when you need incremental backups.

cheers,
bill

[james147]

rsync is great when you need incremental backups.

No it is not, it only stores one version of the backup, it might only copy the changes, but it does not store them. Use rdiff-backup if you want to store/recover the incremental changes (which uses the rsync protocol for transferring these changes).