Backup II

We had looked at backup options some months ago but nothing really seemed to fit. What we wanted was something similar to time machine for OSX - a backup that would not lose anything and would run to an external drive that could be restored in case of hard drive failure. We also have a backup motherboard and backup cpu's in case of real disaster. What we don't want to lose is the countless hours getting our system just right.

This has always been a problem on windows machines - you just get the machine set up right but when you upgrade or buy a new machine you have to spend so much time reconfiguring and re-installing.

Well last week we read about a program called flyback that seems to do the same things as time machine. The project web site is at: http://flyback-project.org/

It is a google code project and there is more info at http://code.google.com/p/flyback/ including some install instructions. It is not in the ubuntu repositories so you have to get it. Off to the terminal we go.

$ sudo apt-get install python python-glade2 python-gnome2 python-sqlite3 python-gconf rsync

which works. We already had most of the packages installed except for python sqlite. Now we do:

wget http://flyback.googlecode.com/files/flyback_0.4.0.tar.gz

Resolving flyback.googlecode.com... 209.85.173.82
Connecting to flyback.googlecode.com|209.85.173.82|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 25,616 (25K) [application/x-gzip]

100%[====================================>] 25,616 135.79K/s

14:54:03 (135.06 KB/s) - `flyback_0.4.0.tar.gz' saved [25616/25616]

Now we do:

tar -zxvf flyback_0.4.0.tar.gz

to extact the compressed files from the archive. It extracts the following:

flyback/
flyback/flyback.py
flyback/backup_backend.py
flyback/viewer.glade
flyback/GPL.txt
flyback/config_backend.py
flyback/opengl_viewer.py
flyback/desktop.py
flyback/help_data.py

Now we change to the flyback directory and fire it up as a regular user (not as root) with:

python flyback.py

and the result is an error when the GUI runs:

The folder contents could not be displayed
error accessing 'file:///external_storage_location': File not found

Ok so now we do some digging. BTE it would be useful if the gui installed a menu entry under system. Looks like the error is not a problem you just have to change the default configuration under preferences. It suggests an external drive so we pull an 80gig usb drive out for a test run.

The drive mounts but it is a mac HFS+ partition that was used as a temp backup for the macbook when replacing the drive. So we should probably reformat this as an ext partition. On windows this can be done with partition magic. On linux the similar program is qparted which is installed. So we run it. The mac drive shows up as dev/sdc2

So we unmount the volume. We reformat the partition as ext3 and commit the changes. so we now an external vol called backup.

Returning to the flyback gui and in the Storage Location tab set the backup location to the external hard drive. Then in the Included/Excluded directories we select the filesystem which puts a / in the window pane. We could select our home folder if all we wanted was a document backup but we are interested in a complete backup. We leave the excludes along, assuming it is a reasonable setting.

Finally, in the schedule tab we tick the automatic box and click OK. In the flyback main window we click on backup to start the process. Backup is now running....


We'll come back later to see how it is going.

A good article by Falko shows how to do all this. See:
http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-snapshot-backups-with-flyback-ubuntu-7.10