Remote Backup Linux

Linux based workstations and servers can easily be backed up remotely, unfortunately there aren’t too many commercial services like those available for Windows or Mac computers as the Linux community is still kind of small even though more than 2% of current Internet users use Linux and more than 60% of the Internet’s servers run on Linux or other Unix variants.

We were only able to find one commercial service that would openly support Linux workstations, however that isn’t something that should make you blue, as backing up a Linux based workstation or server is one of the easiest tasks, and if you’re familiar with the command line (shell is the proper term in Linux systems), you won’t have a problem backing up your computer or server as well as automating the job.

The easiest way to back up your computer or server is by using rsync, which is a small command line utility that is already included in the base install. There are some graphic front ends for it, which you can use if you’re running a graphic desktop environment such as Gnome or KDE.

Rsync can create a full back up only once and then just keep it syncronized remotely, the connection to the remote server can be tunneled by SSH or Secure Shell which is a secure standard to connect to remote servers in a secure and efficient way.

The entire process can be automated using a cron job and some scripting if you want to fancy it. Otherwise you just have to edit your crontab (crontab -e at the command line does the trick) and adding a line for rsync to execute every day with the proper parameters.

It’s even possible to use rsync to create incremental backups, whch will let you roll back to a previous state or version.

There are also other alternatives, like Time Vault, which is Linux’s version of Apple’s Time Machine, which will not only let you roll back to a previous state, but will also save screenshots of how your system looked like at a certain date.

For Linux servers there are some stronger enterprise grade solutions, like R1Soft’s CDP solution which provides continuous data protection by updating your backup constantly and therefore minimizing the risk of any data loss. But hey, you can still use the same command line utilities that you would use on a workstation as the server and workstation environments aren’t that different from each other.