Top 12 Open Source Backup Tools for Linux Systems

When it comes to data safety and security, not only large companies, but also personal computer owners also need to have good backup and recovery software that protects their data from losing their precious data. To overcome these issue, there are a lot of open source backup software tools that are available that can help protect your data. And nowadays, computer desktops come with huge storage capacity and in turn it means lots of data being stored. This also leads to a huge risk of losing all the data if the system gets crashed and it may take several days and weeks to recover and repair the damage cause. Hence it is increasingly important to have a proper recovery solution with you all the time.

In this article we are going to review some of the top 12 open source back up tools for Linux systems:

1) Bacula

When it comes to open sources backup tools for linux systems, Bacula is one of the most widely used and popular backup and recovery solution for linux system. It also helps in verifying the data across different computer networked systems effectively. Bacula comes with an effective and advanced storage management solution that helps you to recover all lost and damaged files pretty much quickly when compared to other backup and recovery solutions. It is the complete backup solution that is needed for a small or even a large enterprise to maintain and secure their data. Bacula comes with two versions, the Basic and Enterprise version. The basic version comes with all the basic features needed in a backup and recovery solution and the enterprise version comes with a lot of advanced features including Metal backup, cloud back and also backup solutions for VMs.

2) Duplicati

Duplicati is another popular linux open source backup solution that is available completely free even for commercial usage. It is designed to run in various operating systems including Linux, Windows and MacOS. With Duplicati, you can easily take online backups and comes with a pause/resume feature to pause the backup process during any network issues and will automatically resume backup once the issue is rectified and the process continues from where it stopped. Duplicati also conducts regular checks on the backups to detect for any broken/corrupt backup. All backups are provided with an AES-256 encryption and all backups are compressed and stored on the servers.

3) rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a great filesystem snapshot tool that is capable of taking incremental backups in both local and remote filesystems. It is an rsync based backup system that can be used to take backup for any number of machines in the network. Since rsync is cleverly designed to use hard links, the disk space in your system is effectively used. By hardinks, it means even though it looks like taking a complete backup everytime, it only takes a full backup and then only the differences are backed up to save more space. With ssh, rsync can be used to take snapshots of remote systems as well.

4) Amanda

Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver also called as Amanda is another great open source backup and recovery software for linux systems. It is basically an enterprise grade backup solution and according to the company, Amanda is running on around a million servers and desktops worldwide across various operating systems including Linux, Windows, UNIX, MacOS, BSD etc., Amanda comes in three different editions including Community edition, Enterprise edition and Zmanda Backup appliance. The community edition is freely available for download whereas the enterprise edition supports live application backups and databases. The Zmanda backup appliance is a virtual machine that is capable of backing up an entire network easily.

5) rsync (Command line tool)

Rsync is another popular linux open source tool that helps in quick incremental file transfers. Rsync can help you to transfer files to local host to remote host and vice-versa. The remote-update protocol enables the speedier file transfers as it checks if the destination file already exists and stops copying the file again. The delta-transfer algorithm also enables it to sync remote files easily and quickly as it doesn’t send the overall file, but only the differences are only sent and hence the sync is pretty much quick.

6) BackupPC

BackupPC is another enterprise range open source backup tool that supports all major operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac. It is also a high performance backup system that utilizes compression and pooling setup that greatly reduces the disk storage along with disk I/O.

7) Rear (Relax & Recover)

Relax and Recover also called as Rear is largely kind of a setup and forget utility as you don’t need to do anything after installing the utility in your system as it takes care of backing up and restoring files when needed automatically. The design is completely modular and easy to use and supports various boot media types including USB, eSATA, PXE, ISO and OBDR etc. It also supports both tar and rsync internal backup methods.

Read Also : How to Install and Use ReaR (Migration & Recovery tool) on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

8) Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a great backup and cloning utility that can help you clone or take an image of an entire partition or a disk easily. It is available in two versions including the Clonezilla Live edition and Clonezilla SE edition. It is a complete free and open source backup utility and the Live edition is ideal for taking backup and restoring of single systems whereas the SE or the server edition is perfect to take huge server backups. One of the important features of this cloning utility is that it only used blocks and restored in the hard disk and thus enhancing the cloning efficiency.

9) Back in Time

Back in Time is an rsync based backup utility that comes with an interesting feature of using hard links during the backup process. Since hard links are used in this backup utility, it is easy to remove old snapshots by looking at the snapshots at regular intervals. Back in Time also doesn’t allow compression.

10) Bareos – Open Source Data Protection

Bareos stands for 「Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced」 is an open source backup software that can be used to take efficient backup and restoring of computer and can take backups in different media’s including tape backups and disk backups. It enables the system administrator to easily manage all kinds of backup, restore and data verification of computers of an entire network.

11) Box Backup

Box Backup is the next open source backup utility in our list that only copies or backups the files into the disk only. It doesn’t support other kind of backups including tape or disk backup. It comes with strong encryption features and also uses only minimum bandwidth. The backup utility is totally automatic and fully secure.

12) sbackup (Simple Backup Suite)

sbackup or Simple Backup solution is that is primary developed as a desktop backup utility. Sbackup can be used to take frequent backups of your files and directories and it also utilizes regular expressions to exclude files that are already copied. It supports compressed archives and hence it can be used for taking backup of huge data. Even though it is popular among users for its predefined backup solutions, it can also be used for manual, scheduled and custom backups. But sbackup only comes with a backup solution and doesn’t have any restore feature.

Also Read: How to Use TimeShift to Backup and Restore Ubuntu Linux