Duplicati - An Open Source Powerful Free Backup Tool

Duplicati is an open-source free backup program that creates backups with the ability to store them securely encrypted, incremental and compressed on cloud storage services and remote file servers. At the moment it has the ability to work with Amazon S3, Windows SkyDrive, Google Drive, Tahoe LAFS, Rackspace Cloud or it can use your own SSH, WebDAV, SFTP or FTP file server.

One big advantage of Duplicati is that it uses standard UNIX components such as rdiff, zip, AESCrypt and GnuPG to create the backups. This will allow you to recover the files even if Duplicati is not available. A built-in scheduler makes sure that backups are always up-to-date. Duplicati is licensed under LGPL and available for Windows and Linux.

Install Duplicati

You will have to visit Duplicati website where you will find it packaged in different flavors like .deb for Debian/Ubuntu/LinuxMint, .rpm for CentOS/Fedora/RHEL or binaries for other distributions. It also requires Mono to run, an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework that is available on most Linux distributions, you can find more info on Mono website.

Wondershare UBackit- Just a overview

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Wondershare UBackit- Just a overview

Download the appropriate package and use your package manager to install it like this:

For Debian/Ubuntu:

# wget http://duplicati.googlecode.com/files/Duplicati%201.3.4.deb
# dpkg -i Duplicati\ 1.3.4.deb

For CentOS/Fedora/RHEL

# wget http://duplicati.googlecode.com/files/Duplicati%201.3.4.noarch.rpm
# rpm -i Duplicati\ 1.3.4.noarch.rpm

Create your first backup

After you finished the installation you can run the program either from the System menu or by simply running the Duplicati command in a console.

It will display the initial backup wizard where you can either create a new backup or restore an old one:

After you select a new backup option it will ask you to name it and then give you a few options of what to backup, you can either choose from the per-defined folders or add custom folders:

Next it will ask you for a password to encrypt the backup data, this step is optional, but it's highly recommended if you intend to use a cloud service:

It will then ask you for the location where you wish to store the backup content, you have a variety of options like cloud services or remote locations. If you choice a cloud service it will ask you for your username and password of the service:

Next you will presented with more advanced options, where you will be able to setup various aspects like how often the backup should run, when to remove old files, different limits and bandwidth usage and filters to include or exclude specific files:

After this Duplicati will create your backup and take care to do all the incremental backups so your data is up to date:

It's a nice utility that is simple to use but offers some pretty powerful features.