Luckybackup: Linux back-up made easy

There are a lot of back-up tools out there. From the overly easy to the overly complex. Many of those back-up tools go unnoticed and unused. Some of them get recognized as the outstanding projects they are. One of those tools is Luckybackup. This tool was awarded Sourceforge’s ideal new project of 2009. There is a reason for that. Luckybackup is a easy to use back-up tool that can back-up both to a local machine and to a remote machine – with a user-friendly gui and all the features you would anticipate in a back-up tool.

You might think that Luckybackup is a tool only an end-user could love. Not so. Although Luckybackup is easy to use, open source, and free it’s a worthy candidate for business back-up as well. Oh sure, you’re not going to image your machines with this back-up tool, but you can back-up your data. In this article I am going to show you how to install and use Luckybackup.

Installation

Installation is simple. If you’re lucky Luckybackup will be found in your distributions repositories. If that’s the case, just fire up your package manager tool, search for “luckybackup” (No quotes), choose Lucky Backup for installation, and click apply. That’s it. If you’re not luck, and Lucky Backup isn’t in your repositories, then you will have to go to the Lucky Backup download page and download the binary for your distribution. Once you have that file it’s as easy as either letting your browser auto-detect and let a tool like GDebi install the package, or install from command line like so:

rpm -ivh luckybackup-XXX.rpm

Where XXX is the release number.

Using Lucky Backup

Figure 1

I am going to walk you through the steps for creating a remote back-up using Lucky Backup. The remote back-up I am going to illustrate uses ssh for the network transportation. For simplicities sake I am going to illustrate how you can do a back-up with user intervention. To really make this work, you will want to set up password-less secure shell communication. You can see how this is done in my article “Five handy secure shell tips and tricks“.

Once installed open up a terminal window and issue the command luckybackup. This command will open up the user-friendly gui (see Figure 1) where you add all of the backups you want to create.

Let’s walk through the steps of creating an ssh-based backup.

Step 1: Click the Add button.

Figure 2

Step 2: Fill in the necessary pieces of information in the new window (see Figure 2). This information will include:

Name: Name to give the backup.Type: Full or incremental.Source: What you want to backup.Destion: Directory on local or remote host to store backup.

REMOTE TAB:

User remote host: Check this box.Destination: Check this box.User: Username on remote machine.Host: IP Address of remote machineSsh: Check this box.

Step 3: Click Okay to save your settings.

Step 4: Click Start to start the back-up process.

If your back-up was set-up correct you will immediately be informed such and, in the terminal window where you started Lukcybackup from, you will prompted for the remote users password. Enter the password in that terminal window and hit enter. Your back-up will begin.

As I mentioned earlier, to avoid having to be prompted for your password (this will be necessary for scheduled backup) you will need to set up password-less secure shell.

Final thoughts

That was simple. That is exactly how a back-up tool should work. Give Lucky Backup a try, you may not find a Linux back-up tool as easy to use.

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Submited at Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 1:00 pm on Technologies by arrisa
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