Best Linux CLI or GUI based Backup Software?

[Tomahawk]

I'm after some free backup software for my laptop which is dual booted with Fedora/Windows XP and would like to back up both filesystems to an external HDD.

What is the best backup software you'd recommend? Preferably one I can schedule and supports different backup schemes.

As mentioned I'm running Fedora 10 with Gnome (mainly) and then have it dual booted with XP for some applications I use.

Any help appreciated!

[peterb]

Dump and TAR are both native Linux applications for backing up data. Dump works at the disk level, TAR (similar to Zip) works at the file level.

For barebones recover (and also a backup program) have a look at mondorescue.

TAR has graphical interface (file roller). The others are CLI driven. Dummp is very verstaile - you vcan (and I do) back up to a tape on a remote machine (the rdump variant) over a secure (ssh) link. However you can just as easily back up to any other device on the local machine.

man dump will give you the basic command line options - there are lots of them, its a versatile program - better to print it and study it carefully.

You can do timed backups by setting up a cron job.

Dump is also supported by the webmin application, which is the nearest you will get to a gui.

[Tomahawk]

Thanks for your reply really appreciated. I'm looking at Mondo Rescue and am going to try this out on the weekend. Also checking out tar/dump and combining it with cron may also be more than sufficient for my requirements (probably tar + cron as was looking at incremental backups).

[peterb]

Dump will do incremental backups, (on a scle of 0-9 as a CLI option where 0 is everything, and 9 is minimal - a bit OTT IMHO having 10 levels, but ) and restore will allow yu to retrieve a single file from a dumped file system.

If you haven't used webmin, you might wnat to look at that - a very good graphical admin tool which operates via HTML, so you can remotely administer a machine using a web browser.

[kellyharding]

I find using XFS filesystem and the associated xfsdump/xfsrestore programs pretty good.

Otherwise BackupPC is reckoned to be pretty good.

You could also use rsync of course.