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Add to SafariWhen comparing Back In Time vs BackupPC, the Slant community recommends Back In Time for most people. In the question“What are the best backup programs for Linux?” Back In Time is ranked 1st while BackupPC is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Back In Time is:
Although highly customizable, Back in Time is also suited for people who want an easy tool to use that will back up their data. You can use BiT simply by configuring where to save snapshots, what folders to backup and when to do it.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use
Although highly customizable, Back in Time is also suited for people who want an easy tool to use that will back up their data. You can use BiT simply by configuring where to save snapshots, what folders to backup and when to do it.
Pro Efficient use of storage with file-level deduplication
Pro Highly configurable
Almost all functionality of the program can be customized. It's possible to set when snapshot get removed based on age, available disk space, quantity in a set time period, you can include and exclude files, folders and filetypes, you can defer backups when on battery power, you can ignore errors, you can preserve ACL, extended attributes and so on.
Pro No need to install anything more on the backed-up PC
Pro Able to handle large amount of servers and data
The disk IO can be a bootleneck but the system itself handles even multi terabyte servers easily.
Pro Supports various platforms
Backup method is highly configurable, using local copy, ssh, rsync, SMB or custom transfer, so able to backup almost any OS supporting these.
Pro Open Source
Pro Efficient disk format
The disk format automatically deduplicates files, and optionally compress files or assist recovery with redundancy information (par2); storage disk usage is very efficient.
Pro Combining full and incremental backups into "filled" view
Backups are always viewed as a whole, regardless of the count or data content of past incrementals.
Pro Rich command line tools
Apart from the Web UI there are command line tools for doing all tasks related to the backup system.
Cons
Con Interface could be more intuitive
The program uses non-labeled, non-intuitive icons and the purpose and functionality of the file browser is not clear at first glance.
Con Version 3 on-disk format is impossible to "file-copy"
V3 format uses hard-links which is almost impossble to "file-copy" (using filesystem level tools like cp or rsync) on a large system, since the hardlink management eats up vast amounts of memory (the only way to copy a backup server is to copy using a whole-disk copying method). This has been fixed in version 4 format which uses pointer files instead of hardlinks.
Con Web UI timeouts on large amount of data to be displayed
The Web UI needs large amount of time to walk a directory with thousands of entries and it may cause the webserver or client to timeout. Large directories may require the admin to use the command line tools to list or restore files or directories.
