kallasoft

Have you ever caught yourself drooling over Apples Time Machine, but just couldn’t bare jumping ship to MacOS X? You are in luck because you have a few projects to choose from. Most of these applications use rsync (a filesyncing program for *nix) and cron (a task scheduler) to mimic the characteristics of Time Machine.

A savvy scripter could get similar features using these tools, but space for maintain backups can really become an issue. From my experience, there are 3 main gui driving projects out there: Timevault, Flyback, and Back-In-Time.

TimeVault, an integrated, and advanced backup utility that is currently in launchpad for Ubuntu, offers features comparable to Time Machine. It includes pop up notifications and a snapshot browser that allows you to filter search results.  On top of that you are even given a graphical representation of a file change at the very top of the snapshot browser.

For those wishing everything to be maintained by the Operating System, this seems like a pretty solid choice and doesn’t skimp on the details when needed.  It is probably the best bet when looking for a solution that is system integrated, and for those looking to come as close to Apple’s Time Machine as possible (minus the eyecandy).

Above you can see a screenshot of TimeVault’s snapshot browser, including the aforementioned representation of file changes.  The next couple of solutions feel a bit more hands on, that’s probably because they don’t have the tight system integration that TimeVault does.

Flyback and Back-In-Time are the two other frontends I spoke of.  Using rsync and cron to maintain backups, they both maintain pretty similar features.

Both applications have snapshot capabilities, and have the basic usermode backup where a filesystems/folder with write permission can be backed up and restored. Their main windows are pretty straight forward and give you the standard views of timestamped snapshots for a given folder structure.

Each application can schedule when a backup is to take place and when backups are deleted. Of course you don’t want all those /tmp files so each application gives you the ability to enter exclude parameters for backups.

It all comes down to preference, and with multiple products out we have the best thing possible: choice.

While TimeVault offers features comparable to Time Machine and system integration, Flyback and Back-In-Time might be easier to dive into for some homebrew modifications.  You can check out TimeVault here, Back-In-Time here, or Flyback here.