Back In Time

_{Copyright © 2008-2024 Oprea Dan, Bart de Koning, Richard Bailey, Germar Reitze, Taylor Raack
Copyright © 2022 Christian Buhtz, Michael Büker, Jürgen Altfeld}

Back In Time is a comfortable and well-configurable graphical frontend for incremental backups using rsync, with a command-line version also available. Modified files are transferred, while unchanged files are linked to the new folder using rsync's hard link feature, saving storage space. Restoring is straightforward via file manager, command line or Back In Time itself.

It is written in Python3 and available for all major GNU/Linux distributions (but not for Windows or OS X/macOS) as command line tool backintime and GUI backintime-qt. Backups can be scheduled and stored locally or remotely through SSH.

More background info in CONTRIBUTING and HISTORY.

Maintenance status

The project is in active development since the new team joined in summer 2022. Development is done voluntarilly in spare time so things need to be prioritized. Stick with us, we all ♥️ Back In Time. 😁

Current focus is on fixing major issues instead of implementing new features. Stabilize the code base and its test suite is also a matter. Read the strategy outline for details. Please see CONTRIBUTING if you are interested in the development and have a look on open issues especially those labeled as good first issues and help wanted.

The team

The current team started in summer of 2022 (with #1232) and constitutes the project's 3rd generation of maintainers. Consisting of three members with diverse backgrounds (@aryoda, @buhtz, @emtiu), the team benefits from the assistance of the former maintainer, @Germar, who contributes from behind the scenes.

All team members are engaged in every aspect of the project, including code analysis, documentation, solving issues, and the implementation of new features. This work is carried out voluntarily during their limited spare time.

Index

• Documentation
• Contact & Social
• Installation
• Known Problems and Workarounds
• Contributing and other ways to support the project

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Documentation

• FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
• End user documentation (not totally up-to-date)
• Source code documentation for developers

Contact & Social

• Mailing list: bit-dev@python.org can be used for every topic, question and idea about Back In Time. Despite its name it is not restricted to development topics only.
• Fediverse on Mastodon: @backintime@fosstodon.org
• Bugs & Feature Requests: Issues section

Installation

Back In Time is included in many GNU/Linux distributions. Use their repositories to install it. If you want to contribute or using the latest development version of Back In Time please see section Build & Install in CONTRIBUTING.md. Also the dependencies are described there.

Alternative installation options

Besides the repositories of the official GNU/Linux distributions, there are other alternative installation options provided and maintained by third parties. Use them at your own risk and please contact that third party maintainers if you encounter problems.

• @Germar's Personal Package Archive (PPA) offering ppa:bit-team/stable as stable and ppa:bit-team/testing as testing PPA.
• @jean-christophe-manciot's PPA distributing Back In Time for the latest stable Ubuntu release. See PPA requirements and install instructions.
• The Arch User Repository (AUR) does offer some packages.

Known Problems and Workarounds

In the latest stable release:

• File permissions handling and therefore possible non-differential backups
• qt_probing.py may hang with high CPU usage when running BiT as root via cron

More problems described in this FAQ section.

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.

Therefore 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 behavior, you can use Expert Options -> Paste additional options to rsync to add --no-perms --no-group --no-owner to it. Note that the exact file permissions can still be found in fileinfo.bz2 and are also considered when restoring files.

qt_probing.py may hang with high CPU usage when running BiT as root via cron

See the related issue #1592.

The only reliable work-around is to delete (or move into another folder) the file /usr/share/backintime/common/qt_probing.py:

mv /usr/share/backintime/common/qt_probing.py /usr/share/backintime/

Renaming does not work!

Contributing and other ways to support the project

See CONTRIBUTING file for an overview about the projects workflow and strategy.

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_{March 2025}