and when i upgrade to 9.10, does my app(from 9.04) die ?

Please ensure you have /var/backup as a valid folder, since the destination tab uses it as a default. I didn’t! in my dist (8.10). It was /var/backups on my laptop. sbackup then chose /var/archive since it couldn’t find /var/backup and then filled up my filesystem drive so I had not freespace and I couldn’t figure out why for a couple weeks after checking all kinds of posts. I then couldn’t install anything since the drive was out of space, etc, etc.

I ultimately had to gksudo nautilus then shift-delete the backups. I removed sbackup for now then will decide on my next plan of action.

I hope this helps others that might come across this scary event.

Until such time as it provides automatic backup file verification sbackup should only be used as a second or third tier strategy.

It’s a pity we have nothing to match Acronis

Later this week I should have some time to test making the hack to sbackup so it preserves permissions. If it works I’ll post back here with link to download the modded code.

OK, I would like to save the backup to an external location (CD/DVD/USB hard disk, etc) but the destination tab doesn’t seem to support this. Any thoughts?
#
Mike says:
June 14, 2007 at 12:47 am

Under the Destination tab, select custom local backup directory. Then click on the drop-down, select other, and browse to your custom location.
#
Frank says:
June 22, 2007 at 2:10 pm

However, there is only “root” folder. I can’t leave that in order to select the external usb hard disk. I like to backup directly to there. How?
Skip Answers:
Now once you have that first browse box in custom local open select “other” you can the select anyplace you want.. go to where your removable media was mounted. Often it is mounted in /media.
……………………….
Bill says:
December 13, 2007 at 5:28 pm

Is there a way to do a full backup by default instead of Incremental ?
Skip Answers:
Yes, Go to the “time” tab and set “Do a full backup at least…” to 1 day.
……………
Jerad says:
December 9, 2008 at 2:00 am
…I really want something like norton ghost that will backup all my files while keeping permissions. Anyone know of something like that?
Skip Answers:
There are more than a few answers. If you want something that makes drive or partition images like ghost and Acronis True Image (better than ghost IMHO) take a look into gddrescue or dd to make a image copy of the partition. There are several other backup packages that will schedule the backups also… sorta depends on where you want the backups to go. BackupPC (network disk), Rdiff, Amanda… but these are more geared to multiple machine backups. With enough googling you could probably find a script that somebody has written that will use rsync to make scheduled backups… SysAdmins used to to it all the time.

I had one other idea on this. In /usr/share/sbackup there’s the main python script. You can find the tar command line in that. Anybody brave ’nuff to add a “p” to the tar options? The main command line is:
“tar -czS -C / --no-recursion --ignore-failed-read --null -T “+flist_name+” ”

The “p” option in tar says “preserve”. I wonder if you couldn’t stick a “p” between the “z” and “S” to become “tar -czpS”. Anybody know how to contact author or maintainer so I could they could tell me why it’s not that simple?
………….
Max Popp says:
December 15, 2008 at 6:05 am
…Any help and/or suggestions will be welcome.
Skip Answers:
Often a directory will have pretty much the same permissions through out so you could just do a recursive chmod or a recursive chown with the “-R” option on either. So you could go one directory above the one you restored and set permissions with something like: “chmod a+rw -R restrddir” to set all the files in and below restrddir to read/write by all. You can also do wildcards such as “chmod a+x *.sh” to make all bash scripts executable.
………………….
Now I forgot my question

I needed to recover a single text file from a back up. FOUR HOURS to recover it from a 50G archive.

That’s awful.

I have restored a whole directory of apps, and now I am having great difficulty trying to get them to work because of the changed permissions/ownerships. Any help and/or suggestions will be welcome.

TIA

One huge drawback is that if you pick the latest backup, and it doesnt happen to be a full but instead only an incremental, it only restores those files. There is no option to restore back to all of the files you had on a certain backup day. So I am having to restore the last full backup, and then restore each incremental over top of the last.

It is going to take a while…. I really want something like norton ghost that will backup all my files while keeping permissions.

Anyone know of something like that?