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Despite common misconceptions, there are more solid backup solutions for desktop Linux than most people might suspect. Best of all, many of them are completely free with the code being open source. Some of them however, are not.

In this piece, I will give you a break down of each of them. How they can work in your specific situation, where you will find the applications, and I'll provide the needed details so that you can better decide what option is best for you.

'Bare metal' backups using Tar

When you want to clone the hard drive sector by sector, including all of the unused space on that drive, the Tar command is one of the most common methods to do a system backup "down to the metal," as system admins like to say. The advantages are plenty, from knowing for sure that you have everything backed up down to being able to do it easily from a simple command line execution. Not getting caught up in some flakey GUI is a plus for users of this method.

Obvious disadvantages would include the fact that you do not have a GUI to make this happen. Yes, if I was to do this, I would likely create a simple bash script that I could then just double click (got to love GNOME) and let my settings take over from there. Still, there is something to be said about a little GUI action to clearly illustrate what is happening in real time.

And the single biggest and definitely impractical problem is the issue of backing up empty space. This alone makes using Tar a bit of an overkill.

Rsync -- Because being practical does not mean you have to stop being geeky

At its purest, rsync is a very powerful backup tool that is used to do complete backups of your system. But it is able to do so both over a network (using SSH) and also do it by "syncing up" your data as to better preserve free space. In other words, rather than doing one-way mirroring of the day from A to B, A and B are synchronized effectively making what some users like to think of as the perfect backup.

And for users who would rather have a GUI, making the experience a little less daunting, solutions like Unison or grsync would prove to be the best choice for these individuals. Both solutions are great for backing up directories while ensuring nothing mission critical is being overwritten by accident.

For those looking at more of a "Apple Time Machine" type of experience, minus the special effects, then Flyback is likely going to be the best GNOME solution, especially for those of the Ubuntu using variety.

In my mind, the only downside of using rsync is dealing with a corruption that is then copied over to the backup. Worse yet, this might not be discovered until it comes time to either check on the value of the backup by deploying it on a new machine or worse, trying to use it for recovery. This being said, this is generally a problem only when you use something automatic, like in a cron job of some sort. So long as you are familiar with the quality of the directories being backed up, there is really no discernible disadvantage in my mind when using a rsync based solution.

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