NawaMan's Blog

Starting from the desperation of loosing some works to a need of a backup solution. After looking around trying different existing solution without much satisfaction (well they are good just don’t suit me). I sat down and make one. One of the big problem I had with those existing solutions is how can files/folders are set to be included or excluded from the backup. Most of them use pattern matching to do that and that is very hard to maintain. Other problems are multiple backup policies and a reminder to mount the backup device before the backup.

A few weekends later, EasyBackup is created. EasyBackup allows user to select the included and excluded files using Gnome emblems. Which make it very easy as you can see with Nautilus what included and what’s not. It also make use of Nautilus script to provide quick way to revert and recover the files.

I don’t see the program to be popular or anything near that. It is easy to use because it integrates well with nautilus but the setup is not every user friendly and it programmed in php. As you know, Php is not every popular for desktop applications which make it less appeal to other programmer (I think). Due to the fact that I am not yet every familiar with how things are done in python (its libraries) and I am quite a busy man right now. I don’t see myself joining those projects. But I think (and I will be every happy to see) the idea can be ported to other language and platform (like KDE) or included into a better backup solution like TimeVault, SimpleHomeBackup or FlyBack.

As I said, this is supposed to be for personal user for many reasons but after using it for sometimes, I think it can be useful for many people so here it is.

Features

• Basic Backup & Restore operations
  • Backup
  • Scheduled backup
  • Revert files/folders
  • Recover files/folders
• Integrate well with Gnome
  • Add includes/excludes using Gnome emblems
  • Revert and Recover files/folders with Nautilus Script
• Multiple setting for different backup policy
  • Backup can be done by root or/and regular user
  • Allow backup to open terminal to see the backup progress (in case the connection is slow)
  • Allow difference backup target, includes/excludes, time to backup and other setting
• Use rdiff-backup as the backend
  • The liability is good
  • Advance options of rdiff-backup is allowed
  • Display rdiff-backup command (for checking or tweak)
• Automatic backup
  • Flexible way to set crobtab job
  • Reminder for preparing the backup target (such as mounting)
  • Expandable with Pre&Post backup script (can add mysql or svn backup or auto mount)
• Pre-backup and Post-backup script
  • Call shell but can use php directly with it
• Free and Open

See more detail and screenshorts here.