NAME
backintime - a simple backup tool for Linux.
This is command line tool. The graphical tools are: backintime-gnome
and backintime-kde4.
SYNOPSIS
backintime [ --backup | --backup-job | --snapshots-path |
--snapshots-list | --snapshots-list-path | --last-snapshot |
--last-snapshot-path | --help | --version | --license ]
DESCRIPTION
Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux. The backup is done by
taking snapshots of a specified set of folders.
All you have to do is configure: where to save snapshots, what folders
to backup. You can also specify a backup schedule: disabled, every 5
minutes, every 10 minutes, every hour, every day, every week, every
month. To configure it use one of the graphical interfaces available
(backintime-gnome or backintime-kde4).
It acts as a ’user mode’ backup tool. This means that you can
backup/restore only folders you have write access to (actually you can
backup read-only folders, but you can’t restore them).
If you want to run it as root you need to use ’su’.
A new snapshot is created only if something changed since the last
snapshot (if any).
A snapshot contains all the files from the selected folders (except for
exclude patterns). In order to reduce disk space it use hard-links (if
possible) between snapshots for unchanged files. This way a file of
10Mb, unchanged for 10 snapshots, will use only 10Mb on the disk.
When you restore a file ’A’, if it already exists on the file system it
will be renamed to ’A.backup.currentdate’.
For automatic backup it use ’cron’ so there is no need for a daemon,
but ’cron’ must be running.
user.callback
During backup process the application can call a user callback at
different steps. This callback is
"$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/backintime/user.callback" (by default
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is ~/.config). The first argument is the reason:
1 Backup process begins.
2 Backup process ends.
3 A new snapshot was taken. The extra arguments are
snapshot ID and snapshot path.
4 There was an error. The second argument is the error
code.
Error codes:
1 The application is not configured.
2 A "take snapshot" process is already running.
3 Can’t find snapshots folder (is it on a removable
drive ?).
4 A snapshot for "now" already exist.
OPTIONS
-b, --backup
take a snapshot now (if needed)
--backup-job
take a snapshot (if needed) depending on schedule rules (used
for cron jobs)
--snapshots-path
display path where is saves the snapshots (if configured)
--snapshots-list
display the list of snapshot IDs (if any)
--snapshots-list-path
display the paths to snapshots (if any)
--last-snapshot
display last snapshot ID (if any)
--last-snapshot-path
display the path to the last snapshot (if any)
-h, --help
display a short help
-v, --version
show version
--license
show license
SEE ALSO
backintime-gnome, backintime-kde4.
Back In Time also has a website: http://backintime.le-web.org
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Oprea Dan (<dan@le-web.org>).