Backup Open Source

The term open source refers to software where the author (either an individual or a community) gives full access to the source code. This is very important for developers as they have a chance to see how things are done, make sure that there aren’t any bugs (coding mistakes), that security isn’t compromised and even modify the code to improve it or to customize it for a specific use or application.

Most open source software is also free, which means that it’s available free of cost for anyone to download, this initiative has generated an entire model based on freedom, having organizations like the GNU and the Open Source Initiative as supporters. Open source has grown so much in the last few years that nowadays you can find almost every kind of application available as open source and most of the times it works even better than it’s commercial counterparts.

When it comes to backup applications, there’s a wide array of open source applications, you will find an application for every individual need. Here we’ll try to provide a quick review of some of them.

AMANDA. Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver is a program designed to back up several computers on a network, using a client-server model, which means that there’s a “client” part running on every computer to be backed up and the “server” part running at the storage server. AMANDA clients are available for every flavor of unix (unix, linux, bsd, etc.) as well as for Windows.

Bacula. Bacula is designed to work in heterogeneous networks, or networks with different operating systems running on workstations. The system administrator gets access to a command line console or a web based interface, where he/she can set up the entire network process. Clients are available for Linux, Unix and Windows.

FlyBack. Flyback is the open source alternative to Apple’s Time Machine and is based on rsync, the remote syncronization utility. As Time Machine does, FlyBack shows incremental backups ordered by date, so every file backed up can be restored to a previous state. By using rsync, it can upload to remote backup servers either in the same network or on the Internet.

TimeVault. TimeVault is another software created following the Time Machine approach. It will also create incremental backups and display them ordered by date, as well as some snapshots.

CloneZilla. CloneZilla is a disk imaging program which can create a full image of your hard drive that will allow for later restoration. One of the main features of CloneZilla is it’s live CD, which will allow you to boot your computer directly to CloneZilla in order to do a full backup or restore without any operating system limitations.

As you can see, there are plenty of open source alternatives to commercial backup software, this time we just listed a few, but there are dozens and you can find one that suits your needs.