# Backup utility as mindless as OS X Time Machine?



## mikepwagner (Nov 18, 2016)

My wide is a bit of a Luddite, and has been insisting on using our very old iMac - I think it's a 2004.

Last night the old iMac became unresponsive.

My wife wasn't sure she really needed any files, but she didn't like the idea of losing them.

I was looking at the computer, and I saw a USB hard drive sitting next to the UPS. I recalled that when I first got that machine, I bought the hard drive, and I'd plugged the drive in and Apple had asked, if I had wanted to use the drive for Time Machine, and I had said yes.

I plugged the drive in, and it had backed up Kate's files faithfully every day - including last night at midnight. So I was able to move all of her files to a newer MacBook Air.

Kudos to Apple for making backup so mindless that I had plugged a drive in a decade ago, said "yes" to Time Machine, and never thought about again. I haven't used that iMac in years.

Is there a simple mindless backup tool for FreeBSD?

I know that I could write cron job or something like that, I just wonder if there is a tool as simple to use - and forget - as Time Machine.


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## kpa (Nov 18, 2016)

No such thing really, at least not as easy to use. Closest to Time Machine is ZFS snapshots with some manual management. Apple's TM uses a similar system that only stores the differences between each successive backup in a similar way that ZFS stores only the differences between the snapshots and the live filesystem using copy-on-write method.


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## wblock@ (Nov 18, 2016)

sysutils/rsnapshot.  Although you do have to configure it to back up the directories wanted.


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## sko (Nov 20, 2016)

AMANDA can also work with ZFS snapshots. A combination of local snapshots (cronjobs for weekly/daily/hourly/10-minutes snapshots) and AMANDA sending the daylies to an external pool is what I'm using for my desktop machines.

The nice thing with AMANDA: small setups are running in <5 minutes but its also extremely flexible and can easily handle backups for a whole production network over multiple sites, to multiple backup targets (local disks, NAS, tapes/libraries, S3 etc pp) and for the weirdest backup cycles anyone could come up...
Yes, it has to be set up manually, but it's really a "fire and forget" task.


For a native, ZFS-oriented tool with GUI you might want to look at the sysutils/life-preserver from PC-BSD/TrueOS. It offers local/remote ZFS replication for backups with just a few klicks, which covers the basic needs for a single desktop machine. Otherwise it is (was) relatively limited at the GUI level.


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## ANOKNUSA (Nov 20, 2016)

mikepwagner said:


> I know that I could write cron job or something like that, I just wonder if there is a tool as simple to use - and forget - as Time Machine.



As with all things Apple, Time Machine appears "simple" because it relies on a number of assumptions that mostly apply to Apple's target market. Anyone who falls outside that set of assumptions is likely to be frustrated by Time Machine sooner or later.

There are a number of tools that lend themselves to automated, unattended backups, but they require a bit of learning and planning. I have a regular schedule of automated backups running from my laptop to my home file server, but it took a lot of searching to find a tool that I really liked, and another week or so for me to really nail down a scheme that worked for my purposes.


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## gkontos (Nov 20, 2016)

Time Machine is Apple's innovative technology that does not exist on other OS's. If FreeBSD was meant to be run primarily by (inexperienced) desktop users, then a similar utility could be build using ZFS.
At this point there is simply no need for that.


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## phoenix (Nov 21, 2016)

It doesn't get much more braindead and simple as a cron job that runs a recursive snapshot on a ZFS pool every night.    And then having a simple ZFS send/receive to an external USB drive (recursive if you want the whole pool, or just of individual filesystems if you only want data backed up).  It's what I'm running on our FreeBSD storage server at home, and it's set-it-and-forget-it.  (Once a month or so I make sure the external ZFS pool imports correctly and the files are readable.)

Okay, so it's not quite as simple as checking a box in a GUI.  But it's much simpler than installing any kind of 3rd party backup software on any OS.


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## ComradeSlice (Nov 21, 2016)

ZFS is as close as you'll get. Time Machine uses directory hard-links to give you a tidy interface to your backups. You can have something similar if you turn on snapdir. One for each dataset though.


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## gkontos (Nov 21, 2016)

phoenix said:


> It doesn't get much more braindead and simple as a cron job that runs a recursive snapshot on a ZFS pool every night.    And then having a simple ZFS send/receive to an external USB drive (recursive if you want the whole pool, or just of individual filesystems if you only want data backed up).  It's what I'm running on our FreeBSD storage server at home, and it's set-it-and-forget-it.  (Once a month or so I make sure the external ZFS pool imports correctly and the files are readable.)
> 
> Okay, so it's not quite as simple as checking a box in a GUI.  But it's much simpler than installing any kind of 3rd party backup software on any OS.



Whatever.. still your reply is irrelevant to the OP question. It really sucks when someone does not read the full thread and replies like that. My guess is that you think that the OP's wife is braindead?

PS. Don't write something just because you are a MOD that would eventually insult other people. If you can't understand what the OP is asking just let it go.


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## phoenix (Nov 22, 2016)

gkontos said:


> Whatever.. still your reply is irrelevant to the OP question. It really sucks when someone does not read the full thread and replies like that. My guess is that you think that the OP's wife is braindead?



I did read the whole thread.  OP was asking for a backups solution for FREEBSD that was as simple to setup and manage as TimeMachine on the Mac ... for himself to use on the FreeBSD server in the house.  Maybe you didn't read the whole thread?  My response was to the OP himself, as he was the one asking for a backup solution for his FreeBSD server.  Nowhere did I mention anything about the wife, as that wasn't germane to the topic.



> PS. Don't write something just because you are a MOD that would eventually insult other people. If you can't understand what the OP is asking just let it go.



No idea how you got anything insulting out of my post, but that says a lot more about your reading comprehension than my writing ability.


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## forquare (Nov 23, 2016)

Perhaps sysutils/life-preserver from PC-BSD/TrueOS might be something to look into?  Looking at this documentation, it looks like it's supposed to use a backup server, but I _suspect_ that you could just use localhost and point it at a ZFS pool on your external hard drive.

Apologies for not having more information, I've not used it before, but knew of its existence.


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