BACKUP SOFTWARE FOR LINUX Rob Colstadt, CEO of BSDi, told a story at the 1996 Australian Unix User Group national conference: A BSD OS customer had phoned up. (customer:) "My hard disc has just crashed, and I need to get the data off it." "What does it say on page 4 of the manual?" (reading) "If you do not have a good backup, you will be sorry." "Do you have a backup?" "No" "Are you sorry?" "Yes!" "There you are, then. Works as advertised!" 1. Non-tape options, all sorts. Not otherwise addressed here. 2. Homebrewed script setups front-ending tar, cpio, afio, dump/restore. Dig through ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/backup/ . 3. Proprietary packages: Arkeia (Arkeia Corporation, formerly Knox Software) BackupEdge (Microlite Corporation) Backup Exec Linux Agent (Veritas Software) Backup Express (Syncsort) Backup Professional (Unitrends Software Corporation) BrightStore, formerly ArcserveIT (Computer Associates) BRU (TOLIS Group, http://www.tolisgroup.com/, took over rights to BRU from defunct EST=Enhanced Software Technologies, http://www.estinc.com/ See also: XBRU, BRU-Pro, QuickStart, BRU 2000, BRU Personal Edition) CommVault Galaxy (CommVault Systems) CTAR / CTAR:NET (Unitrends Software Corporation) EaseBackup Professional (KieSoft) Lone-tar & Backup Professional (Lone Star Software / Cactus International) NetVault (BakBone Software, Ltd., formerly NetVault, Ltd.) Networker (Legato. Look around for the "unsupported Linux client" directory. Server requires Sun Solaris/etc. or MS-Windows NT.) NovaNET (NovaStor Corporation) Omniback II client for Linux (part of HP OpenView for HP/UX) PC Parachute (Unitrends Software Corporation) PerfectBackup+ (Merlin Software Technologies, Inc.) SAMS:Alexandria (Computer Associates) TapeWare Universal (Yosemite Software) Time Navigator (Atempo, formerly Quadratec Software) Uniback (Orbit Software) 4. Open-source packages (mirrored here except as noted): o afbackup, Albert Flugel's Backup, http://www.afbackup.org/ Client/server backup management system & engine. Can use mtx or stctl to control tape changers. 850003 Sep 4 22:59 afbackup-3.3.4beta8.tar.gz NOTE: A very nice (proprietary) Web-based frontend interface to afbackup, implemented as a Webmin plugin, is available in the form of AFBackup Manager, http://www.sourcepole.com/sources/software/afbackup_manager.wbm/ . o afio, an improved file-archiver/copier/manipulator, compatible with cpio but much more resistant to file corruption. Command-line tool. By Mark Brukhartz, Koen Holtman (koen@win.tue.nl), et al. From ftp://metalab1.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/backup, ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/tbackup/ 692 Nov 26 1999 afio-2.4.6.lsm 88412 Nov 26 1999 afio-2.4.6.tar.gz o Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver), http://www.amanda.org/ Excellent front end to either tar or dump/restore. ----- removed ----- amanda-2.4.2p2.tar.gz o Bacula, http://www.bacula.org/ Client/server networked backup tool. Provides scheduler, catalogue services (back-ended by MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Sqlite, and support for a wide range of tape drives and autochangers. Admin is console-based or X11/wxWidgets, with GNOME in development. (copy not hosted here) o B.U.R.T. (Backup and Recovery Tool), http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/ Nice Tcl/tk front-end. Uses its own back-end engine. 63810 Sep 4 22:47 burt-2.4.7.tar.gz o cpio, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/cpio/ General utility for cp'ing IO streams including groups of files, and thus for backing up / moving / copying / manipulating them. Command-line tool with infamously obscure syntax. 185281 Jan 21 1996 cpio-2.4.2.tar.gz o Datbkr, http://www.psychosis.com/datbkr/ Fast, light script front-end for tar. 7230 Mar 3 1999 datbkr-1999030301.sh o ext2-filesystem dump/restore utilities, http://dump.sourceforge.net/ By Stelian Pop. Please note that this utility is filesystem-dependent, and also that it gives truly reliable results only if the filesystem isn't mounted. 184556 Sep 5 11:40 dump-0.4b23.tar.gz o FlexBackup, http://members-http-3.rwc1.sfba.home.net/flexbackup/ Script for dump/restore, afio, tar, cpio, zip/unzip. By Edwin Huffstutler (flexbackup@home/com). 34630 Sep 4 22:56 flexbackup-0.9.8.tar.gz o gzip file compresser/decompressor, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/ By Jean-Loup Gailly (gloop@chorus.fr). 798720 Sep 5 1999 gzip-1.2.4a.tar o Hdup by R. Gieben, http://www.miek.nl/projects/hdup/hdup.shtml, is a front-end to GNU tar to do backups, optionally cryptographically secure across the network to remote hosts. 31310 Jul 19 12:38 hdup-1.3.6-3.tar.gz o hostdump.sh, http://www.storagemountain.com/hostdump.html Sophisticated shell script. Will use dump, cpio, or tar, in that order of preference. 28207 Sep 4 23:01 hostdump.1.34.tar.gz o Install Backup, by Donncha O Caoimh. http://cork.linux.ie/projects/installbackup/ . Successor to Tob. Good. 94753 Sep 4 22:55 installbackup-0.1.tar.gz o Kbackup, http://kbackup.sourceforge.net/ ncurses-driven (or command-line) front-end to afio or tar. By Karsten Ballueder (Ballueder@usa.net). ----- removed ----- kbackup-1.2.11.cvsroot.tar.gz o KDat from the KDE Project. http://sunsite.dk/qweb/kdat/ Nice Qt/X11 front-end to tar. 192934 Sep 4 22:54 kdat-1.99e.tar.gz o Linux Backup (GTK-based), http://www.linsupport.com/sw/linuxbackup.html By Patrick Lambert (drow@post.com). 16301 Sep 4 22:48 lnxbackup-1.0.tar.gz o Mondo, http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/ comprehensive backup / recovery toolkit. Supports NFS or CDR[W] as backup targets, in addition to tape. By Hugo Rabson. ----- removed ----- mondo-1.47_20021020.tgz o mt-st, ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/backup/ mt-based (Mount Tape) utility with support for Linux SCSI tape (/dev/stXX) ioctls, and including an stinit program to initialise tape devices. By Kai Makisara (Kai.Makisara@metla.fi). 14864 Mar 3 1999 mt-st-0.4.tar.gz o MTX, http://mtx.sourceforge.net/ Originally created by Leonard Zubkoff as an enhanced verseion of GNU "mt" (mount tape). 153537 Sep 4 22:47 mtx-1.2.13.tar.gz o pax, ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/compress/ A POSIX-compliant utility capable of handling both tar and cpio archives. Can construct incremental archives using vdelta algorithm. Handles gzip and compress archives upon input and output. 105538 Oct 24 23:47 pax-2.1.tar.gz o rkbackup, http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/#rkbackup. A script front-end for dump, suitable for use with cron. By Richard Keech. 22360 Jan 06 04:20 rkbackup-0.6.tar.gz o rsync, ftp://rsync.samba.org/pub/rsync/ Flexible, easy, fast file mirroriing/copying/moving utility for the command line. 332253 Sep 5 2000 rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz o star, ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/ Highly optimised version of tar. (Double-buffered FIFO streaming, does sophisticated diffs.) By Jorg Schilling. 367307 May 31 21:17 star-1.3.1.tar.gz 27513 Jun 17 1997 star.man.ps.gz o Taper, http://taper.e-survey.net.au/ Self-contained, ncurses-oriented backup system. By Yusuf Nagree (yusuf@omen.net.au). ----- removed ----- taper-6.9b.tar.gz o tar, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar/ Tape ARchiver and file copying/ moving/manipulating utility for the command line. Two optional patches add support for bzip2 compression. ----- removed ----- tar-1.13.shar.gz 3118 Sep 5 13:42 tar-1.13-bzip2-option-I.patch 2157 Jul 30 1999 tar-1.13-bzip2-option-y.patch o tarfix, ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/backup/ Tools for processing damaged tar archive file. By sewilco@fieldday.mn.org (Scot E. Wilcoxon). 442 Jun 7 1996 tarfix-1.0.lsm 105273 Jun 7 1996 tarfix-1.0.tar.gz o Tob (Tape Oriented Backup). No longer maintained. Final version is mirrored at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/utilities-general/ , as it is vanished from the primary ftp://ftp.icce.rul.nl/pub/unix/ site. By Karel Kubat. Front-end to tar or afio. 36 Sep 4 23:23 tob-0.14.tar.gz -> ../utilities-general/tob-0.14.tar.gz o Unix Backup Tool (UT), http://issco-www.unige.ch/staff/robert/ubt/ Full-screen front-end management utility for command-line backup tools like dump. Supports defined backup sets. Requires Tcl/Tk and Expect. By Gilbert Robert . 23306 Oct 19 15:15 ubt-1.3.tar.gz o WiredBackup, http://www-pr.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/c/mitarbeiter/ schiessedownloads/wiredbackup.tgz. Reachable via http://freshmeat.net/projects/netbackup/ . Makes an incremental tar backup, compresses it with bzip2, and symmetrically encrypts it using gpg. The changed backup data is then transfered to an ftp server. By Marcus Schiesser . 7669 Nov 14 14:28 wiredbackup-0.2.tar.gz o XFS-filesystem dump/restore utils, ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/download/ 434348 Jun 27 08:40 xfsdump-1.0.9.src.tar.gz 5. Good informational sites: http://www.storagemountain.com/ (was http://www.backupcentral.com/) http://www.storagemountain.com/toc-hardware.html http://www.storagemountain.com/toc-software.html http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/backups.html http://baheyeldin.com/linux/using-tape-backup-on-linux-for-a-home-network.html