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Jun 17, 2012
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Backup your files with Deja Dup!

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There may be three reasons for this. The first one is that your files are not that important so you don’t care if you loose them or not. The second is that backing up takes time and resources. The third reason is that you may think that it is a complicated process that requires special technical knowledge to perform with success. Deja Dup is the answer to the third statement, and the answer is “no”.

Deja Dup is the GNOME way to backup your files in a simple and easy, yet powerful and secure way. Let’s see what we can do with it…

The start screen gives you two choices. The first one is to start restoring a previous backup while the second allows you to access backup settings and start a new backup task. You can restore files from a previous backup in many different ways including local, remote, or cloud backup locations, such as Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, and even Ubuntu One!

The creation of a backup is not difficult either. All you have to do is press the “Backup Now” button, choose a password for your backup accessibility and choose a destination for your files.

If you don’t want to do this manually, you can easily set up a backup schedule by simply choosing how often you want to backup and how long these backups should be kept in your storage space.

Deja Dup can also encrypt your backups for security, and compress them for storage resources economy. It is very easy to use and integrates well with your GNOME desktop. How about a backup today?

 
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  • http://www.kaipee.co.uk/ Keith Patton

    Doesn’t quite work. The backup tool built in to Ubuntu 11+ (which uses deja-dup) constantly fails. There is a relatively large Launchpad bug about this.

    Also just telling people to back up isn’t anywhere near enough. General users (probably those that need told these things) wouldn’t know WHAT to back up.
    Which directories get backed up and, perhaps more importantly, which don’t get backed up? For example /var/proc/ will leave your system constantly hanging if you attemp to back it up.

  • Zend HetMij

    Nice suggestion. I’m with Keith Patton telling the avarage user what to backup. On the other side… Linux isn’t that user friendly yet, so most user know what to backup or have some friend do it for them. 

  • goldspy

    Another big point missing here is that of compression. A lot of times it isn’t that I don’t have time to back-up but rather that I may not have enough space or the space I do have is more valuable. In that case I was wondering if you might include any information on the compression options of deja dup, if there are any? It seems hard to find any really good information on the *deep* compression of files, as I have noticed some ~250mb files being compressed down to the likes of 20-50 mbs. That is what I want to know about.

    • Bill_Toulas

      Compression is done while encrypting, but no information or settings about the ratio is available :(

    • http://www.kaipee.co.uk/ Keith Patton

      Deja-dup kind of sucks tbh. The archiving method of it is a little strange.

      I find Bank In Time to be a much better solution and allows for versioning

      • Bill_Toulas

        Thanks for sharing that Keith. It would be nice if you’d provide a link though. 
        Deja Dup is a simple solution aimed for the average user. It is certainly not a fully featured backup tool, but it is simple to use. That was the aim of this article too. To show to the average user that backups can be simple and easy to do for everyone :)

        • http://www.kaipee.co.uk/ Keith Patton

          No problem Bill. Link for Back in Time is http://backintime.le-web.org/

          Again, when talking about backing up (especially in Linux) much more needs to be covered such as what to back up and what not.

          To be quite honest I’m very very surprised that the likes of Ubuntu don’t incorporate rsync or rdiff into aptitude/apt-get to allow for a ‘system restore point’ functionality when providing updates (more notably driver updates).

          If guidance and instructions are given then the likes of Back in Time are fantastic tools, but it’s just not enough to say “Use this, it’s great”

          • Bill_Toulas

            You are right about Ubuntu, but I suppose a “system restore point” would complicate things and surely add too much extra time on driver updates. It should be optional though, no matter what.
            I will check Back in Time, and provide a more comprehensive article to help our readers do things right in that sector.
            Thanks for the feedback Keith!

        • EH

          Deja Dup is easy to set up, and in that way I can see why one might say it’s aimed at the average user. However, where it falls down is in the most important situation: restores, which are not covered in this post.

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