The simplest backup is to just tar-gz your home directory, but it’s painfully slow. A friend put me on to lz4 which isn’t installed by default in ubuntu & mint, it moves the bottleneck from the compressor to disk i/o for my spinning rust usb disks.
The default output of this is basically silence for two hours while it runs
which isn’t great. Enter pv (pipe
viewer)
which can show you progress based on byte count.
Install lz4 and pv with:
sudo apt install liblz4-tool pv
And then pipe the output of tar through pv and into lz4
Here’s a quick script for backing up my home folder to an external drive; customize to suit your needs:
#!/bin/sh
# https://gist.github.com/timabell/68d112d66623d9a4a3643c86a93debee#file-backup-sh
echo "Opening/creating backup folder..."
mountpoint=/media/tim/backup/
cd "$mountpoint"
mkdir -p fox
cd fox
base=/home/
src=tim
echo "Getting source folder size..."
size_bytes=`du -sb "$base/$src" | awk '{print $1}'`
echo "$size_bytes bytes to backup."
echo "Backing up..."
tar -cpC $base $src -P | pv -s "$size_bytes" | lz4 >> "$(date -d "today" +"%Y%m%d-%H%M")-home.tar.lz4"
echo "Done."
This script is also available here: https://gist.github.com/timabell/68d112d66623d9a4a3643c86a93debee#file-backup-sh
Things to watch out for
- Progress is inaccurate and variable because it’s based on input bytes processed vs total, but the speed is limited by output bytes to the spinning rust backup disk, and the ratio varies with the compressability of the input data.
- Finding a file will require reading or decompressing the entire archive because of the way tar works.
Keeping it simple
There’s lots of great backup tools for backing up home but most of them create obscure custom formatted backups, often with incremental backups and chunked up files for efficient use of space. While that’s great I know from experience that you don’t always have all the right tools available to unpack such things when you really need them, and there’s always the chance that you are missing an important incremental. In short complexity is worrying when it comes to backup (and especially restore).