FlyBack – A Time Machine for Linux
If you’re not familiar with Apple’s Time Machine, it’s a backup system that lets you browse using historical snapshots of what your system used to look like. It’s pretty neat, but I use Linux, not MacOSX. So I rolled my own.
November 7th, 2007 at 9:26 am
I hope you are building this modular enough that you can change backends from rsync to btrfs (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/) or lvm snapshots. Remember that you have the freedom to not just copy but improve.
BR,
Paul Tötterman
November 7th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Excellent work! Gonna test it out @ home tonight.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Currently with Time Machine you can hang an external HDD off one machine while backing up many machines to that shared resource. I have a Linux server (Fedora 7), a MacBook (circa ‘07), and a Dell D630 laptop. I back the laptops to the Linux box with either rsync(MacBook) or MS SyncToy (Dell) and then the Linux box runs a cron to rysnc all the data to an external drive and a remote location via ssh.
Will Flyback support a method whereby I could have my two laptops backup to the Linux box the same way Time Machine does? I realize the Dell doesn’t have things like rsync, but it could, or could have some installer. I don’t particularly want to install something like Cygwin just for this type of functionality.
The beauty of the Mac is that it’s a all-around solution for their computers. I wish other groups would give that same focus to an all-around solution.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
To Kenn North:
You can isntall a standalone rsync that uses a very very thin cygwin wrapper. You end up with ssh + rsync + one or two cygwin dll’s.
Search for cwrsync
November 7th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I haven’t played with this yet, but I’d like to make a suggestion based on my own backup scripts.
It would be nice if flyback would first mount a device to store the backups, and give the user options to continue or exit based on whether that mount was successful. I’ve filled my primary disk on accident before…no fun!
I’ll keep your page bookmarked and be looking forward to future releases.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Did you stop working on “flyback”?
The Idea was great… but your Version is quite old…