Back In Time

Copyright (C) 2008-2022 Oprea Dan, Bart de Koning, Richard Bailey, Germar Reitze, Taylor Raack

About

Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux, inspired by "flyback project".

It provides a command line client 'backintime' and a Qt5 GUI 'backintime-qt' both written in Python3.

You only need to specify 3 things:

• where to save snapshots
• what folders to back up
• backup frequency (manual, every hour, every day, every month)

Documentation

The documentation is currently under development in https://backintime.readthedocs.org/

Support

Please ask questions and report bug on https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues

Known Problems and Workarounds

Development / Maintainment status

The development of this project has been dormant for a while, but a small team has started to get things moving again. Stick with us, we all love Back In Time :)

If you are interested in the development, have a look below under Contribute.

Incompatibility with rsync >= 3.2.4

Back In Time is currently incompatible with rsync >= 3.2.4.

If you use rsync >= 3.2.4, as a workaround,

• add "--old-args" in "Expert Options / Additional options to rsync" and
• Modify /usr/bin/backintime
  • to include export RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1.

File permissions handling and therefore possible non-differential backups

In version 1.2.0, the handling of file permissions changed.

In versions <= 1.1.24 (until 2017) all file permissions were set to -rw-r--r-- in the backup target.

In versions >= 1.2.0 (since 2019) rsync is executed with --perms option which tells rsync to preserve the source file permission. As a consequence backups can be larger and slower, especially the first backup after upgrading to a version >= 1.2.0.

If you don't like the new behaviour, you can use "Expert Options" -> "Paste additional options to rsync" -> "--no-perms --no-group --no-owner". Note that the exact file permissions can still be found in the file fileinfo.bz2 and are also considered when restoring files.

Python 3.10 compatibility and Ubuntu version

backintime versions older than 1.3.2 do not start with Python >= 3.10.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with Python 3.10 and backintime 1.2.1, but has applied a patch to make it work.

If you want to update to backintime 1.3.2 in Ubuntu, you may use the PPA: see under INSTALL/Ubuntu PPA.

Download

Please find the latest versions on https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases/latest

INSTALL

Back In Time is included in many distributions and can be installed from their repositories.

Ubuntu PPA

We provide a PPA (Private Package Archive) with current stable version (ppa:bit-team/stable) and a testing PPA (ppa:bit-team/testing)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-qt

or

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-qt

Debian/Ubuntu make packages

./makedeb.sh
sudo dpkg -i ../backintime-common-<version>.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../backintime-qt-<version>.deb

ArchLinux

Back In Time is available through AUR. You need to import a public key once before installing

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 615F366D944B4826
# Fingerprint: 3E70 692E E3DB 8BDD A599  1C90 615F 366D 944B 4826
wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/backintime.tar.gz
tar xvzf backintime.tar.gz
cd backintime
makepkg -srci

From sources

Common

• dependencies

  • python3 (>= 3.3)
  • rsync
  • cron-daemon
  • openssh-client
  • python3-keyring
  • python3-dbus

• recomended

  • sshfs
  • encfs

• Command

    cd common
    ./configure
    make
    make test
    sudo make install
  

Qt5 GUI

• dependencies

  • x11-utils
  • python3-pyqt5
  • libnotify-bin
  • policykit-1
  • python3-dbus.mainloop.pyqt5
  • backintime-common

• recomended

  • python3-secretstorage or
  • python3-keyring-kwallet or
  • python3-gnomekeyring
  • kompare or
  • meld

• Command

    cd qt
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
  

configure options

first value is default:
--no-fuse-group | --fuse-group (only COMMON)
    Some distributions require user to be in group 'fuse' to use
    sshfs and encfs. This toggles the check on or off.

--python3 | --python (all)
    Use either 'python3' or 'python' to start Python Version 3.x

NewsFeed

Back In Time has a RSS feed https://feeds.launchpad.net/backintime/announcements.atom

Contribute

There is a mailing list for people who want to contribute to the development: https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/bit-dev.python.org/

There is a dev-docu on https://backintime-dev.readthedocs.org It's not complete yet but I'm working on it. If you'd like to contribute please add docstrings following the Google style guide and add unit-tests for new methods in common. To run unit-test locally you can run cd common && ./configure && make test

_{December 2016}