
Cronopete – A Linux clone of Time Machine - bradley_taunt
https://rastersoft.com/programas/cronopete.html
======
eythian
Ubuntu's backup thing (duplicity?) does something like this too. I can right-
click in a directory and restore deleted files, or on a file and view previous
versions.

One suggestion for the author of that webpage, and a common complaint I have
with open source software websites in general: tell us what your software
does. I haven't used a mac, I don't know what features time machine has in any
sort of detail so telling me it's a clone is pretty useless. Give a one-or-two
sentence saying what it does, and then some bullet points of key features.

There's more description of the name than there is of the functionality.

~~~
mynegation
Duplicity works by making a full backup and then series of incremental backups
based on it. Eventually you can make another full backup and new series, but
you cannot delete full or incremental backup without rendering whole series
corrupt. In Time Machine (and - I presume - this software), if you delete a
backup checkpoint for a specific date you lose only file changes captured by
that checkpoint, but state of the backup at the checkpoints before and after
remain intact.

~~~
ric2b
I believe the correct name for what time-machine does is differential backups.

Instead of doing a full backup and then having a chain of incremental backups,
each differential backup stores all the differences from the full backup, so
they are much larger but it allows you to delete previous differential
backups.

------
paule89
What i really miss on Linux, or for backups in general:

Make it super easy.

I just want to open the software and tell hey here is my network
drive/external drive. Please start the backup of all my installed apps, all my
configurations, all my music and develop files.

Also for restoring, just make it easy. Can somebody point me to a good
solution? The problem is Linux is too diverse. Either you use basic tools like
rsync which everybody can use, or you get super specific with automated btrfs
backups onto a specific btrfs drive with deduplication and backup snapshots.
Sounds super useful. But not easy as well. Also a gui would be nice, or at
least a super in depth tutorial walking you through backing up your apps, your
configs, your ssh keys. whatevs.

~~~
rakoo
I've used restic
([https://github.com/restic/restic](https://github.com/restic/restic)) in the
past, and it works quite well.

Other people would also recommend borg
([https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/))
although I've never used it so I can't say anything about it. rsync.net even
has a special offer if you're using them
([https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html](https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html))

But really if you want to make it dead simple you can't go wrong with tarsnap
([https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/)). It's written and
maintained by one of the biggest names in the crypto community, the guy who
has spawned scrypt, among other things.

~~~
dewey
> But really if you want to make it dead simple you can't go wrong with
> tarsnap

I'd call this everything but dead simple. Maybe for the average software
engineer it's okay but I don't I could tell anyone in my family to set this up
themselves and then monitor that it's doing it's thing correctly.

TimeMachine is two clicks in self explaining steps (Plug in empty external
drive, OS asks if you want to use it as a backup source, you click "yes" and
it starts doing backups every hour). That's probably what GP meant with "Make
it super easy." not this:
[https://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html](https://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html)

It's a cool service but it's not "dead simple".

------
tannhaeuser
Can also recommend BackInTime, which is just a GUI for the rsync command-line
app - like all good Unix utilities should be. Though BiT is Python 2 I
believe, and I don't know if it did make it into Ubuntu 20 LTS yet (probably
yes, and there's nothing to worry).

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
GH page says Py3.

~~~
fnord123
Indeed they only test on Python3: [https://github.com/bit-
team/backintime/blob/master/.travis.y...](https://github.com/bit-
team/backintime/blob/master/.travis.yml#L14)

------
kdtsh
Time Machine is one of the best features of macOS in my opinion. Apparently
your mileage may vary, but I’ve never restored a backup to a new computer with
such ease as I did when I swapped a MacBook Air for a MacBook Pro last year.
I’ll be saving this and giving it a try on my Linux boxes.

~~~
juskrey
Time Machine has one huge issue: when it doesn't work, it becomes a bigger
problem.

~~~
metafunctor
Could you elaborate on how Time Machine doesn't work? It's been pretty trouble
free for me; other than taking a ridiculously long time for the initial backup
with no good indication of progress.

~~~
vetinari
Simple:

\- make a backup,

\- have your Mac serviced; it will be returned wiped,

\- try to restore from your backup - and it fails. It won't tell you why it
failed, only that it failed.

The end.

~~~
metafunctor
OK. I have done that, several times [x], and didn't run into any problems.

I do wonder, though, what kind of integrity checks do Time Machine backups
have. I've always treated TM as the first line of defence and, as such, it has
worked well for me. However, in addition to TM, I have other offsite backups
in the cloud for disaster recovery.

x) I haven't had my macs serviced several times, but I have restored from
backups a handful of times due to, ahem, accidentally rendering the system
unbootable a couple of times.

~~~
vetinari
In my case, I did the TM backup specifically because my Mac was going to be
serviced (display; so accessing data was not a problem).

Otherwise, I don't use TM, I'm using another solution. It won't restore entire
system and installed apps, just my files.

So with TM, it was Murphy I guess.

~~~
sosborn
This is actually how I have TM set up. I ignore anything not in ~/Documents
(or any other location with personal files). The other stuff is so easily
replaceable that I'm not concerned if I lose it.

------
Daub
The distinguishing feature of Time Machine, and one which this project seeks
to emulate, is its use of file navigation on the z axis.

Given the requirements of this particular task, this is the perfect choice. 3D
navigation of the OS has been tried many times (Microsoft Bob anyone?), but to
my mind, this is the only time it has really worked.

~~~
kspacewalk2
To me, the distinguishing feature of Time Machine is that it reliably works.
It worked reliably when I first bought a Mac 12 years ago, it works reliably
today. I'll put up with the fact that it's slow and naive (file and hardlink
based), and the UI gimmicks are kind of unimportant to me. I care about the
recovery.

~~~
_jal
I'm glad it works for you, but I abandoned it due to unreliability. My
experience has been that it works fine for some period of time and then the
sparsebundle will randomly break. MacOS claims it is corrupted, I have to jump
through hoops to make it work again.

I will note that I'm doing it over a network mount, not a local drive, and
this is probably the source of the problem, but I never could resolve it. So
I'm just back to rsync for specific directories. Which is fine, when this Mac
dies, I'm moving to Linux.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
It was never real good about backing up over a network except with hardware
specifically designed to support that, like network routers that support Time
Machine drives (or Apple's own Time Capsule).

I don't know that I'd say my own experience with Time Machine is perfect, but
it's generally done what I needed to do, and has actually saved my bacon a few
times by letting me restore individual files back to specific versions easily
-- something I'm not sure an rsync-based solution would really provide (e.g.,
versioning for everything).

------
antoncohen
The mechanism of rsync + hardlinks is similar to BackupPC[1][2], which is an
18 year old open source backup tool, written in Perl, with a web UI. It
supports backing up Mac, Windows, and Unix-like OSs, and is primarily for
centrally backing up multiple computers. BackupPC's UI is obviously not as
slick as this, but it does allow restoring individual files from a given date.
If I remember correctly from 10+ year ago, their tar over SSH transport option
performed better than rsync when used on a fast network.

[1]
[https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/](https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackupPC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackupPC)

~~~
thaumaturgy
For folks that want to back up data on remote servers, BackupPC is one of very
few comprehensive backup systems I've found that can run on a server hidden in
a closet somewhere and connect out to the remotes to retrieve data. Most
backup systems run on the remotes and have the remotes connect into the backup
server in some fashion, which I find kinda horrifying.

I've used BackupPC for a long time and I totally love it, though I get why
it's never been the most popular option. The initial setup will take an
experienced sysadmin a couple of hours if they're doing it for the first time.

~~~
eikenberry
This is pretty straightforward to do with standard rsync. You just setup a ssh
tunnel first and have it use that. That's how I backup my VPS from my home
fileserver.

------
feeboo
Why not use borg? With fusemount i can mount a snapshot and navigate/restore
the files. It's very convenient.

~~~
Jnr
Or Vorta, if you want GUI.
[https://vorta.borgbase.com/](https://vorta.borgbase.com/)

~~~
jedieaston
They missed a real opportunity to name it "Locutus".

------
atoav
Reminds me of Timeshift on Linux mint:
[https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift](https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift)

Used this with joy for a few years now

~~~
j-james
Not just for Mint, I've had a very good experience with it on Manjaro.
Especially with a pacman hook to backup before a system update [1]...

[1] [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/timeshift-
autosnap/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/timeshift-autosnap/)

------
akvadrako
Although neither the webpage nor README explains how it works, I'm guessing it
misses a vital Time Machine feature, which is FSLogger.

If you have lots of files, scanning your whole directory tree every hour is
too resource intensive, especially on battery power.

~~~
viraptor
It delegates all the actual file operations to rsync. In practice, it looks
like it does multiple scans each hour - glob on all excluded folders, then
running rsync with a big list of excludes for each configured folder.

There no clever modification monitoring. I'd keep this away from folders with
many thousands of files.

~~~
rastersoft
I'm the author. I doesn't do a glob on the excluded folders, it just passes
the list to rsync.

Also it changes the priority of rsync, to avoid it using too much CPU.

------
Commodore_64
I had initially thought that it was just a MacOS X app clone but however since
trying it out I have found that it is actually better than the app was trying
to replicate. I'm gonna port this to gentoo now, see you guys in ten years.

------
WhyNotHugo
Funny that the developers seem to be spanish speakers.

Crono = Chrono Pete = Blowjob

~~~
GonzaloQuero
I'm a Spanish speaker and that does not make much sense to me, but it might
mean something in the latin american variants, I guess.

~~~
someguyorother
Urbandictionary says it's Argentinian slang.

~~~
GonzaloQuero
"Pete" seems to work as slang, and it kinda makes sense to me reading the UD
explanation, I was just confused by the Chrono part in the original comment.

------
jancsika
Found a typo. Change this:

> one dairy copy for the last 15 days

to this

> one dairy copy for the last 15 dairs

Also, what's the speed of choosing to delete one of the snapshots sandwiched
in between other snapshots?

------
LeoTinnitus
Can someone explain to me why Time Machine is so great? I've used it, but I've
just never found it worthwhile in comparison. For me it was very slow (but
worked in the background which was nice), only mimiced my drive based off of
whats currently on it and if I deleted it in the past.

I guess because I have several backups that I rotate, that essentially is my
time machine that only goes as far back as my last backup for that drive.

~~~
ghostpepper
I think the killer feature of time machine is that it's dead simple and
intuitive for non technical users to do regular full system backups.

You plug in an external HD, open time machine, flip a big switch that goes
from "Time Machine is Off" to "Time Machine is On" and the software does the
rest.

Full backups, incremental backups, reminders to connect your drive when it
hasn't been backed up for a while, and a visual interface for selecting
previous versions to restore to.

~~~
LeoTinnitus
My problem with it is that I still need another mac to use it. In the event of
an emergency (IE theft or disaster), the last thing I want to hinder me from
accessing my backup is an operating system. Especially a high cost and not as
commonly used in public spaces operating system.

------
Exorus18
Wonder when something similar appears named JohnTitor.

------
mosselman
Restic feels like a good alternative with a CLI. It supports lots of backends
too, either directly or through rclone.

~~~
tankenmate
i've been using restic daily to a local store (with compression and encryption
turned on), and then once restic has finished its daily run then i rclone to
backblaze. i keep one snapshot per day for a week, 1 weekly snapshot for a
month, and 6 monthly snapshots. i pay about £1 per month for about 250GB of
data (prior to compression / encryption).

for those unfamiliar to restic, you can mount a r/o snapshot via fuse for ease
of access as well as the command line tool to programmatically access the
repo.

~~~
mosselman
Why don't you let restic upload directly to backblaze? I am sure you know this
is possible, just wondering on why you made that choice, not trying to be a
smartass ;).

~~~
tankenmate
I did at first but the latency was a killer; it took about 2~3 hours to make a
snapshot. If I did the snapshot locally and then used rclone to back up the
restic repo to BB then the whole operation took about 15~20 minutes, and the
snapshot itself took less than 5; if the rclone gets interrupted you can just
restart it.

------
stewbrew
I'd be wary if a backup programm doesn't strongly distinguish between the
logic (the command-line client) and the gui. I cannot tell if this one does,
but since it tries to "mimic [Time Machine] as closely as possible", I guess
it does not.

~~~
viraptor
There's a dbus layer which defines the actual backup operations, so without
actually diving into the code to confirm this - I suspect there's a reasonable
separation.

------
jessermeyer
Tangentially related -- Dragonfly's HAMMER(2) FS has historic fine-grained
snapshots built-in as a first class citizen.

~~~
linsomniac
As does ZFS, unless I'm missing some distinction of "first class" in ZFS.

I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu 20.04 ZFS support. If I can use crypto
with it (either the ZFS crypto or LUKS stuff), I'm going to switch my
workstations over to it. ZFS snapshots work so, so well.

One thing I've really wanted from HAMMER is the deduplication. I've always had
problems with ZFS dedup. I tend to really want it on my backup servers, but
the DDT requires pretty amazing amounts of RAM. HAMMER's dedup seems less RAM-
hungry, but I've only run small tests of it.

------
zenlibs
How does vala compare to other GUI focused languages?

------
awinter-py
on the market for self-hosted remote backup with partial checkout features &
mobile client

am sort of using owncloud for this now but it's slow

------
lazylizard
Er.. Rsnapshot?

~~~
deeblering4
Rsnapshot is great. Super simple and reliable.

I keep seeing new time machine-esque backup tools and feel like they are re-
inventing the wheel in a more complicated way.

Some complexity is acceptable sure, say to encrypt backups for remote storage.

But the rsync hardlink approach used by rsnapshot is super rugged and just
works for a majority of workloads.

------
sabarasaba
pete in some south american countries means "blowjob".. i know its a bit niche
but i cant help to giggle when reading this product name.

