Hi guys
I’d like to back up the data from my NAS and have until now been using external hard drives and an rsync script. I would however like a simpler method (GUI) which ideally would allow me to encrypt the data on the drive, allow incremental backups and a way of providing error correction. as if for example one of my videos gets corrupted, I don’t have any way to recover it. Is there someway of doing this and can someone please suggest a good program to do all this?
Thanks in advance
If you want real backups as opposed to an rsync replica, I would look at vorta, which is gui front-end for borg. It is in the AUR as vorta.
It supports encryption and deduplication. Deduplication is better way to solve the problems solved by an incremental backup.
Doesn’t Borg create lots of individual config files though? If any of them become corrupted, I wouldn’t be able to restore the whole backup would I?
Err…doesn’t creating lots of small files lower your chance of unrecoverable corruption? It you use one big file, wouldn’t your chance of corruption be much higher?
Borg also has tools to handle integrity checking.
Lastly, you could test, but I don’t think a single corrupted data element would make your whole backup invalid in most cases.
I guess the question I would have is what is the alternative from your perspective and does that alternative actually lower your risk?
It’s not exactly the software you’re looking for, but like @dalto mentioned about borg, I use Pika Backup (it’s in the AUR, but also a flatpak too) to back up all my data files like music and videos, which also uses the borg backend and I’ve been using it for about a year or so now, no issues to report. Pika still lacks encryption and scheduled backups, so for encryption there is also an application similar to Pika Backup, but by far more popular called Deja Dup, which uses the duplicity backend (similar to borg, but also different, each are great backends in my opinion). These two applications were made with the Gnome desktop in mind, FYI. You didn’t mention what DE you were using, but these two are the ones that I have used in the past on my system and I can happily recommend either of them for backing up your local data files.
Edit: if you do get any errors when updating in Pika Backup for example, it’ll alert you at the end if there was an issue. And since Pika only needs to update the files that were changed since the last update, all you would need to do was re-run the backup again and it’ll be fixed and it won’t waste any time at all.
Hey Scotty, thanks for the suggestion, I’ll give it a go. I’m running KDE Plasma by the way.
Out of curiosity, why use a gui front-end to borg that doesn’t support most of it’s features when a more fully featured gui for borg exists?
While I suppose you can think of it that way, that isn’t really what borg is doing. It is actually backing up all your data but only storing modified blocks.
duplicity is actually radically different than borg. It isn’t even really the same concept outside of them both being backups. 
Well since you’re on KDE, if you want something that fits the Qt ecosystem a little better there are also a few options for backups:
luckyBackup (it’s in the AUR, uses rsync btw)
KBackup (it’s in the Arch Extra repos)
Kup (pronounced Kay-Up, in the Arch Community repos)
Just a heads up I haven’t personally used any of these myself, but plenty of other Linux users do use them.
Well, as a Gnome user myself I like to support various Gnome developers whenever it makes sense to me, so when some new software comes out (like Pika Backup or Fragments) that I think has potential and looks promising, I’ll try to make it a point to incorporate it in my workflow to use it, to test it, to report any bugs for it, to offer any advice for potential future features, and a few other general things like that. Essentially, I’m just trying to help out in my own small part if that makes sense. Now obviously theses two applications aren’t feature rich by any means, but for some users that is okay. Also, as time progresses Pika Backup will get more features when the developer has time. It’s only one developer at the moment I believe so things will take some time of course to improve, but they are an active developer.
Yes you are more accurate, my understanding of things is always put into it’s most simplified form that makes sense to me.
lol well yes right you are, I almost didn’t want to include that when I typed it out in the first place since this isn’t a thread discussion on borg vs duplicity and I didn’t want to hijack this thread and spawn a lengthy debate on all things backup related. But yet here here are now 
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