Is there now any chance that Timeshift and BackInTime might be added to the Solus repository? I know the answer used to be "no," but as I remember it involved systemd, and given the recent work I thought maybe it might now be a "yes."

On other distributions in the past I found those both to be extremely useful, and very easy to use. I'd sure love to see them available from the Solus repository, rather than GitHub, so that updates aren't a separate chore.

    Does BTRFS tool help with this, i am not sure did i get it correctly but i think it has something to do with rollingback your system to a certain point.

      laky Does BTRFS tool help with this

      I'm not sure, but I'd guess not. BTRFS is a file system that's different from the EXT4 file system that this machine uses. I suppose it's possible that a utility might access both systems, but I wouldn't expect it to. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

        laky brtfs supports snapshots which are not the same thing as backups. The main point of a backup is that if anything goes wrong you have the data somewhere else that you can get to. Snapshots are local and can easily be nuked by accidentally reformatting the whole disk or filesystem corruption.

          EbonJaeger The problem with Timeshift is that it only supports cron, and not systemd timers

          Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten what the exact problem was.

          It seems that the timers would only be needed for scheduling unattended backups, right? I'd be happy to fire off an occasional backup, e.g. just before a series of updates, or some other auspicious occasion. No timers required.

              WetGeek It depends on cron in order to actually build, if I remember right. At the least I remember that extensive changes needed to be made in order to try to patch it, and even then it never really worked.

                WetGeek

                Did you have a look at Déjà Dup Backup Tool? It's in the repository and it's a unattendend, efficient, robust and user friendly backup solution

                    bvdlingen Did you have a look at Déjà Dup Backup Tool?

                    I did. And Duplicity. And some others. I don't remember what problems I had with what applications, but I couldn't use any of the ones I tried. The "problems" were such as failure to work with my NAS, which is the destination for backups.

                    Yesterday I searched "Backup" in the Software Center, came across restic, and gave that a try. Running it from a CLI without arguments lists all the commands and options, and I found it trivial to create and initialize a remote repository on my NAS. I then had no problem backing up my home folder.

                    Unless I find any problems with it, I'm pretty sure I'll adopt it for backups of my hardware installations. VMs, of course, are easily backed up by making VirtualBox snapshots on the host machine.

                    • n2o replied to this.
                    • n2o likes this.

                        WetGeek restic totally rocks. I've been using it for about a half year and really love it! It's very easy, fast and puts the focus not only on backing up but also on restoring, which is kind of important in some situations 🤣

                            n2o restic totally rocks. I've been using it for about a half year

                            Thanks for letting me know. It sounds like I'm not wasting my time with it! I'm not sure how I missed it before.

                            • n2o replied to this.

                                n2o

                                That pretty much establishes its reliability. 🤣

                                  Timeshift can run on Solus fairly easily, just need to compile dcron if you really must have it.

                                    Justin Timeshift can run on Solus fairly easily

                                    Thanks, but I'm more than satisfied with restic. I wish I'd found it a long time ago.

                                    I've created an alias for restic that fills in my home folder and the location of my /Backups/Linux folder. I put this alias in every .bashrc file. All I need to do to back up my home folder on any of the current Solus editions is to issue the command backup in a CLI. I'm more than delighted with how well this works.

                                        WetGeek I have the exact same setup. Alias backup in my .bashrc 😁

                                          No love for rsync or Grsync? Both are in Solus repo, and very reliable.

                                            Drewfus Oh I totally love rsync and use it all the time. It's a utility that syncs two folders. Backup can be more than that! That said I usually do rsync my restic backup to a remote location 😄

                                              borg in the repo had similarities to restic, uses a repository for backup also . I've found it to be completely reliable.

                                              Vorta, again in the repo, is a very useful GUI for borg (although I think to get the best from Vorta you need to familiarise yourself with Borg in the terminal to begin with)
                                              Borg has, what I find to be, very impressive methods to avoid duplication of data