I'm now using Back in Time and I understand the Time Drive UI a bit better as result. With some adjustments prior knowledge of this shouldn't be needed! I'll post suggestions once I've used it for a bit and will try Time Drive again later.

Meanwhile, a Time Drive category to find all the Time Drive posts would be nice. Alternatively, the Related Posts plugin might be worthwhile. (I had to use Google to find this page again)

I like the theme. Haven't seen it before. Finding a new on is on my to do list, after WP3.0 ships. Enjoyed yr blog.

First impressions

Where is the BACKUP NOW button? I have used a combination of tar, rsync and sbackup (simple backup) and Clonezilla on Linux up to now. Sbackup sets the standard for elegant simplicity. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Lucid which is what started me looking for something better. I was about to give Back In Time a go when I found Time Drive.

First: the program crashed immediately with a SIGSEGV (I had just exited after looking at some menus). The crash log is 10Mb, most of which is a core dump. If you want it and tell me where to upload it I'll be happy to do the needful. I hesitate to upload this to launchpad -- I'll upload the log minus the core dump.

Second: I believe that there should be a default list of directories that are excluded from backup. Sbackup offers, quite sensibly, I think:

/media
/var/spool
/var/cache
/var/tmp

to which I add remote directories mounted under /mnt (on an 8.04 LTS machine on which I run it). Update: I see from the duplicity site that /proc is advisable to exclude. If true, doing so would be a good default.

Entering the command sudo time-drive in a terminal window (after configuring via the GUI) yielded

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py:127: RuntimeWarning: PyOS_InputHook is not available for interactive use of PyGTK
set_interactive(1)
Could not resolve property : linearGradient5167
Could not resolve property : linearGradient5167
Could not resolve property : linearGradient4636
Could not resolve property : linearGradient4592
Could not resolve property : linearGradient4247
Could not resolve property : linearGradient5167
Could not resolve property : radialGradient3709

[ at this point the program opened on screen ]

^CTraceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/timedrive/app.py", line 634, in buttonExit_Pressed
def buttonExit_Pressed(self):
KeyboardInterrupt

OK, on the 2nd attempt I've found the backup button. I thought the floppies represented archives. There's really nothing to beat a button labeled "Backup now". I know there's a tool tip but I missed it the first time. Clicking it yielded

04/04/10 23:27:05 ERROR Failed: /

followed by a report that the backup had completed. I had no better luck backing up my own home directory (exactly the same result).

It's not clear if "Exclude file patterns" expects directory names, directory names plus file names, or file names, as in

/dir
/dir/*
dir/*.tmp

or all 3. Some guidance would help. Symmetry between include and exclude would be nice. Sbackup offers to include and exclude individual files and named directories.

Run 'nice' as a cron job (default: enabled)

was confusing. First, what's nice? I assume it means that running as a cron job is a good idea (in which case Run 'nice', i.e., as a cron job), but I'm used to seeing a field with a ? at the end which is clickable and which explains the option (dnsmadeeasy.com e.g., does it well). If it's the default why isn't the box already checked?

I tried using General Settings and Local Backup Directory (what's the difference if any between these?). Backups failed with both. The backup got as far as creating a username folder on the mounted drive (an NFS partition on a ReadyNAS server that looks local to the OS and which is freely readable and writable by both the user, me, and root).

Having two Advanced buttons on the screen at the same time is a little odd. One deals with overall settings and the other with job specific settings. I would change the job settings to "Customize" and move the advanced options to button on the Options tab.

Can't get into the autoremove menu at all. Not sure it's because there's nothing to remove or a bug.

The restoring files UI is not intuitive.

A green button with a plus sign under Restore files, with a tool tip that says add folders or files the backup queue???

Adding here to the restore queue would make sense, but backup? (under a menu heading "Restore files"?). You've lost me here. Should the tool tip read "restore queue"? I assume so. The red button would be a chance to make it clear but it doesn't offer any more info on the queue.

Two blue "i"s on the screen? Not great from a design pov. One does nothing, the other shows log info. And the ring? Help? Emergency? Rescue?

Clicking on the Restore Files button is good for a heart attack as it triggers an announcement that a restoration is in progress even though there's nothing to restore (I think we've all seen announcements like that followed by non-bootable systems).

So, maybe I just got a bad build but it looks like a great idea but...

The concept is too good to languish. Do consider making a video for YouTube showing the program working and explaining it. And put up a matrix showing how it compares with other backup tools. You'd probably rather focus on getting the project working but it'll happen faster with help. I doubt I'm the only person who has stopped by and wondered if this is a sustainable project despite both the robust underlying tools and and the great idea.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to help with development.

Incidentally, I found Time Drive partly by chance. I didn't find it in any searches on "linux backup" but before I commit to installing anything I search on "better than X" (Back In Time in this case) and it turned up exactly 1 hit.

I tried time-drive under Ubuntu Karmic, but unfortunately it is not working - or I am doing sometnihg wrong (which is more likely).

I am trying to backup one directory to Ubuntu One, which is a local directoy (/home/user/Ubuntu One, but is actually cloud storage solution (similar to Dropbox). When you put a file in /home/user/Ubuntu One, it is synchronized with cloud.

So I went to settings and set:
Local Backup Directory: /home/matthai/Ubuntu One/time-drive-backup
Encrypt Files: "somepassword". BTW: As far as I know, Duplicity enable to use GPG for encrypting. What about Time-drive?

Include (Folders in backup): /home/matthai/Desktop/important

BTW, "Auto-remove" tab is inactive in settings.

Then I clicked to a BackupNow button (diskette) and got a message that backup is completed.

Then I go to Restore files, create new directory (/home/matthai/Desktop/important2), TIme-drive says it has restored files, but /home/matthai/Desktop/important2 is empty.

What could be wrong? I am using Duplicity 0.6.06. BTW, help button for Time-drive is inactive - if you need help for writing Time-drive maual, please let me know. I also cannot rename or delete snapshot history and if I click to shapshot name (it is called Wed Dec 23 14:21:23 2009), I cannot see any files, actually hotnihg happens.

Any idea?

Just off the top of my head, I can think of two things. First, the easy one. Which version of Duplicity do you have installed? Go to the command line and type:

duplicity -version

It should be version 0.6.04 or greater. If it is version, 0.5.x, you'll need to install the most recent version from:

32-Bit: https://launchpad.net/~duplicity-team/+archive/ppa/+files/duplicity_0.6.04-0jaunty1_i386.deb
64-Bit: https://launchpad.net/~duplicity-team/+archive/ppa/+files/duplicity_0.6.04-0jaunty1_i386.deb

If that isn't the problem, this might be an instance of another known bug. Duplicity (and by extension Time Drive) really doesn't like top level folders that have spaces in them (it backs up subfolders with spaces without problems). Thus, if your top level folder looks like this:

/Users/RobOakes/Documents

You will be fine, but if it looks like:

/Users/Rob Oakes/Documents and Settings/My Documents

Time Drive will fail silently. I've fixed this for the next version of Time-Drive, but other features (like Amazon S3 support and the deletion/renaming of snapshots) are not ready for prime-time.

Would you mind trying an experiment? Create a new directory without spaces and put some files in it. Then try and make a backup of that directory. If that doesn't work, let me know and we'll try and we can try and dig into the problem a bit more.

Cheers,

Rob

The next version will also include support for restoring files from older snapshots. I just finished up that particular bit last night and just need to test it.

computer.name.com:[port]//path/to/folder

If you use port 777 for ssh, this might look like:

backup.oak-tree.us:777//Backup/RobOakes

The same trick also works for ftp and the other communications protocols. Though I've broken them up into a couple of different boxes, Time Drive just combines the various pieces of information into a single unified Duplicity url. (I thought it would be a little easier that way.) So, you can use any of the tricks found on the duplicity man page.

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/duplicity.1.html