[PLUG] Back in Time

[Jim Beckett]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> Apparently there is a new (to me at least) GUI backup utility out there
> that is supposedly for dummie desktop users. It is inspired by Apple's
> Time Machine and Linux Flyback. 
>
> The latest and greatest is apparently 0.926, which I was able to
> install easily from the repositories for my Fedora 11 laptop. 
>
> Installing is as far as I got. There is practically no documentation
> and the menus in the GUI need a lot of explanation. For example, there
> is an Exclude tab, and when I clicked on it I expected to see a list of
> folders like /proc and /sys and /tmp. Instead there are things like .*
> and *backup* and +~. I am left to guess what these entries do, and why
> it did not automatically exclude things that should always be excluded.
> There is no explanation of how the pattern matching syntax works.
>
> I could go on about how confusing it is, but I thought I would ask if
> anyone else is using it and has information about how to configure it.
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>
>   
Hi John,

I haven't tried this software, but it looks like you need to specify 
exactly what you want backed up on the include tab, and then use the 
exclude tab to filter the files you don't want from those that you 
specified to back up.

Here is the documentation that I found online: 
http://backintime.le-web.org/documentation/

I think you would need to include the root directory('/') before you 
needed to worry about excluding /proc, /sys, and /tmp.

The default patterns appear to filter hidden files (.*), any files with 
the string 'backup' in the file name(*backup*), and any files that have 
a '~' appended to the file name, from the default included directories 
(/home/user/Documents, and /home/user/Pictures).

* I can't imagine why you would want to exclude the dot-files, though. 
It seems like a recipe for disaster if a newbie (like me) needed to 
restore from backup, and didn't realize that they had not backed-up 
their personalized configuration settings (especially the .VirtualBox 
directory).

-Jim