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For years I have watched in amazement as most articles highlighting various Linux backup solutions merely point out the same old list. While their authors enjoy their "FoSS-ness," they fail to realize that, in the real world, not all of the solutions provided make sense for the casual user. Half of them are really enterprise only.

AMANDA, Bacula … seriously? Not so much for most people. Meanwhile, the fact is this: there is a mix of simple, often less than sys-admin-friendly solutions being completely overlooked.

Dedicated home partitions

If there is one thing you can do to make reinstalling your favorite Linux distro MUCH less of a hassle, it's to maintain a dedicated home partition. This alone has saved me days of data recovery headaches. Even with my Home directory being held off-site as another backup altogether, I have never had much of an issue dealing with anything short of merely reinstalling the Linux installation to get things back to normal. My personal settings are always ready for me with each new install or updated release of my preferred distro.

External hard drive and a command line

While there is likely a cleaner syntax to copying directories such as the Home directory, I have found that a simple cp -r can do wonders when coupled with an external hard drive. While not as sexy as using some GUI based program to run stuff like Rsync, I have found that for preserving one's settings that this is all I ever needed.

Now obviously, this is not going to work for everyone out there. Some people are going to need something a bit more on a schedule, perhaps automatic. But I am willing to bet that the easy of using a simple command line option to just ensure there is some kind of Home directory backup is definitely worth looking into.

Simple backup suite

For most people, this is going to be better received than simply doing a manual backup with a series of commands instead. The idea is simple enough -- select specific directories that you wish to make a daily backup of, select a destination for them, then schedule a backup event to take place. Hence Simple Backup.

The program generally comes as two separate packages when being used on such distros as Ubuntu, which can lead to a bit of confusion. However, installing as sbackup will resolve this, as it will install all at once. While it is not as glamorous as rsync-based solutions using tools like Grync, I find that it is plenty for most people out there.

JungleDisk

This is how I do things most of the time. It's remote, cheap, and works very well with GTK-based desktop experiences such as Ubuntu. JungleDisk uses Amazon S3 to provide a solid backup solution off-site, in such a way as to keep you safe from data loss. JungleDisk works the same on all operating systems; just select the folders you wish to keep backed up then set the program to a schedule. It's that simple.

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