I was long time looking for an easy to use desktop/standalone backup system on Linux without writing weird udev scripts or so on. My requirements where just easy: Define a Backupjob, plug in your USB-backupdrive and the backup begins, when the backup is finished get some notification of the status. Also i wanted a GUI to configure this steps. There were some opensource attempts to provide this feature (okay, nothing with GUI), but nothing i was satisfied with.

So as with many projects i come to the point to say: Write your own. I worked now about 5 days on this new project, mostly in my spare freetime. I call it now in alpha status, some features are still missing but the most are working. I had already some backups running with success on my systems. But it still need a lot of testing, also on different systems.

The concept is as follows.

I wanted to split the project in 3 parts:

1. tiBackupLib – Core library providing functions to GUI and Daemon
2. tiBackup – Backup daemon in background listening to udev/backup events
3. tiBackupUI – GUI tool for configuring the program (optional)

I wanted to design the project that there is no GUI required, means you can still configure the program on a console only (no X) system. For this i decided to save the configuration files in a .ini file format for easy editing on console with text editors.

Also the daemon itself requires no GUI because its a seperate binary. The GUI is only needed for nice and easy configuration and maintanance, like configuring the program or viewing log reports. An approach which is rarely used in the opensource world i think but is important to end users who are used to Windows administration.

The project itself is hosted on github, you can access it on https://github.com/theinvisible/

For more details and tryout please visit my project page: tiBackup