gnome
Backup your system for a desktop user
Sunday, April 5th, 2009 | desktop, english, utilities | 6 Comments
While Linux and Debian are plenty of programs for backing up your system, things change when you need a backup system for a common desktop user. In this area there is a lot of room for improvement, as programs for KDE and GNOME are years behind what programs for Windows and Mac OS X are offering.
There has been some programs intents of writing a good program, full featured and with a nice graphical interface, as Simple Backup, and its fork Not So Simple Backup, pybackpack, or TimeVault, an intent to clone Apple’s TImeMachine, and it’s fork TimeVaultNG written for KDE. Those are projects that start with a great impulse, even some of the mentored by Google Summer of Code, and when they reach some basic functionality, they get abandoned or not being properly maintained.
What I would like to see for a backup system for desktop user is:
- Desktop independent backend. Why implement and reimplement and reimplement again. A lot of effort is lost in early stages, until program starts to be functional. For this, using yet written utils as rdif-backup, duplicity or rdup would allow this step to get ready faster, and being more reliable.
- Frontend integrated with desktop, being it GNOME or KDE. This will imply implementing two desktop clients, so they can use technologies available to each one.
- Using dbus for communicating frontend and backend.
- Backend should be able to detect removable devicies as well as network based backups (think on NAS), and only perform the backup if they are present
- Allow to store backups also in Amazon S3. This could be in raw or even better, with a system that would allow mounting the remote device as a local HDD. This is something JungleDisk makes, and using fuse should not be hard to implement
A lot of improvement and innovation has taken place in Linux Desktop during all these years, but backups are also important for SOHO users, and they need a well integrated program for doing that, as console based solutions usually require configuration skills which desktop users don’t have.
Updated 6th April 22:26 CEST: I have been recommended in comments to try Back in Time and Déjà Dup. Both are in active delopment, which is a bonus. The first one works in a similar way to TimeVault, while the second one works using duplicity as backend, but has support to upload the resulting files to a remote server using SSH or to Amazon S3. I will investigate more on these apps.
Compiz
Monday, October 13th, 2008 | debian, english | Comments Off
Today my 5 years old laptop gave me some filesystem problem after running apt-get update, which resulted in some corrupted packages, among them libc6, with the result of my system becoming non-functional. So I needed a recovery CD to be able to mount read-only root partition.
I had around an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS, so I used it to run its included LiveCD and recover from there. At the same time I was curious about it, as I hadn’t had chance to test it before. One of the things that surprised me most was that Compiz was enabled by default. After a second thinking that this was going to be a problem, making the system unusable (remember, a 5 years old laptop, and I had checked myself compiz some time ago with a catastrophic result), I started to meve windoes, jump from one virtual desktop to other, and minimiza and maximize windows without a problem. The work that had been made amazed me!
So, some fsck and apt-get commands after, I managed to reboot on my Debian system, and I installed compiz. The result: my system goes faster using compiz, with a bunch of effects enabled than running plain metacity window manager. I have a also installed some compiz fusion plugins, and they are running without a glitch and with an incredible speed. Obviously, I have not chosen full quality, but it is enough to show effects in an efficient way.
I have improved my user experience and system speed at the same time… Once again Linux shows that it can get the best of old hardware. Good work, guys!
Categories
Archive
Meta
Search
