Backup (Part II)

I listed some requirements that I have for backup software for a single workstation in an earlier post. I seem to have found a solution that has many of those properties, though not all. It is called SBackup (for Simple Backup) and I am running it on Ubuntu 7.10. (I won't be shifting to 8.04 until all the kinks are worked out, or they invent hibernate for Linux.) It really is simple and runs very well in my situation.

Here's how SBackup satisfies my requirements:

1. SBackup has a modicum of network awareness; it can backup over an SSH or FTP connection in addition to a local directory.
2. SBackup can do incremental and full backups. By default every backup (except the first) in SBackup is an incremental backup. The administrator can specify a schedule for full backups, such as a full backup every 21 days.
3. SBackup has pretty good scheduling. The frequency of full and incremental backups can be controlled. A purging schedule can also be set up, for example: keep all backups for the last week, keep one backup a month for the last year, keep one backup every 6 months for years before that.
4. SBackup's backups are software independent. This was a major problem I had with DAR, which I was using before SBackup: DAR archives couldn't be read without DAR. SBackup just uses tarred, gzipped files. So I have no worries about how I'm going to access the files in backup if SBackup is discontinued or unavailable in the future.
5. SBackup doesn't have encryption, but right now this is not crucially important to me.

In addition, SBackup really is very simple to configure, and it works silently behind the scenes.

Backup

I used to use Dar/KDar for backup purposes back when I was using SuSE 10.2. I've switched to Ubuntu, and it seems KDar is no longer packaged for Ubuntu. It got me thinking: what are the features that I want in a simple desktop backup application? Here are some in no particular order:

1. Network awareness. This is something I missed in Dar, which could only write to a directory on the system, which meant I had to ssh-mount a remote filesystem before I could back up to it.
2. Incremental and Full Backups.
3. A good scheduler. That is, it should be possible to specify the frequency and type of incremental and full backups, and a purge schedule for old backups.
4. Software independence. Dar used its own proprietary format, which forces me to use Dar to look at any of my backups. With KDar no longer available, it is quite painful to try to look at the contents of any of the older backup files. I have to get Dar to extract them somewhere, browse them and then delete them later. Something uses simple tar or tar.gz is much better; I can use Konqueror etc. to browse inside them directly.
   
5. Encryption is good if I'll be using NAS, otherwise it's not as important to me.

Maybe I'll add more requirements later.