Sbackup

I recently moved from Linux Mint to ubuntu Hardy (8.04) Alpha 4 to Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon. I've changed my linux distro about six times since November/December. Since I store most of my information (files) on the windows partition of my computer, it really isn't that hard (I'm dual booting). While I have yet to loose any information while I am distro hoping, I do back-up my files before I move.

I used to burn a DVD or two. Since my brother bought me a large external hard drive, I can now use that. This time I experimented with Sbackup. The program is easy to use. You tell it which directories you want to back-up and where to send the back-up. You can tell it to back-up at certain intervals and it looks like it will back-up only the changes it finds to the directories you choose.

While it looks cool and probably works great, the problem I had was that I could not tell when the last back-up occurred. For me, I'm not interested in timed back ups or regular back-up as my external hard drive is not always attached. Also, even though I told the program to save the files to my external drive, both times I used it the files were save to the default location. I thought I changed the settings before I began the back-up process, but it is possible that I did not (ie it could be my fault).

Sbackup looks really easy to use. I may try it again, but for me it is also easy to just choose the files/directories I want to back-up and move them. If I had my exterior hard drive attached all the time, it would be a better program for me. Another issue is that Sbackup does not show you the progress of the back-up nor tell you when it is done. In looking at the sourceforge project, it looks like that has been a feature request for some time.

This is a cool program. It is not perfect. If you are looking for something to back-up your desktop on a regular basis, this might be what you are looking for. For information visit the Sourceforge project or get instructions here or here.

You can install Sbackup by opening a terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get install sbackup