Copyright (C) 2008-2022 Oprea Dan, Bart de Koning, Richard Bailey, Germar Reitze, Taylor Raack

Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux, inspired by "flyback project".

It provides a command line tool 'backintime' and a Qt5 GUI 'backintime-qt' both written in Python3.

You only need to specify 3 things:

• what folders to back up
• where to save snapshots
• backup frequency (manual, every hour, every day, every month)

• Documentation
• Support
• Known Problems and Workarounds
• Download
• Installation
• News Feed
• Contribute

The documentation is currently under development in https://backintime.readthedocs.org/

Please ask questions and report bug on https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues

The development of this project has been dormant for a while, but a small team has started to get things moving again. Stick with us, we all love Back In Time :)

If you are interested in the development, have a look below under Contribute.

Back In Time is currently incompatible with rsync >= 3.2.4.

If you use rsync >= 3.2.4, you can use one of two workarounds:

1. add "--old-args" in "Expert Options / Additional options to rsync" or
2. modify /usr/bin/backintime to include export RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1.

Note that Manjaro has included the export RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1 workaround in their official 1.3.2-2 version of the package.

In version 1.2.0, the handling of file permissions changed.

In versions <= 1.1.24 (until 2017) all file permissions were set to -rw-r--r-- in the backup target.

In versions >= 1.2.0 (since 2019) rsync is executed with --perms option which tells rsync to preserve the source file permission. As a consequence backups can be larger and slower, especially the first backup after upgrading to a version >= 1.2.0.

If you don't like the new behaviour, you can use "Expert Options" -> "Paste additional options to rsync" -> "--no-perms --no-group --no-owner". Note that the exact file permissions can still be found in the file fileinfo.bz2 and are also considered when restoring files.

backintime versions older than 1.3.2 do not start with Python >= 3.10.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with Python 3.10 and backintime 1.2.1, but has applied a patch to make it work.

If you want to update to backintime 1.3.2 in Ubuntu, you may use the PPA: see under INSTALL/Ubuntu PPA.

Please find the latest versions on https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases/latest

Back In Time is included in many distributions and can be installed from their repositories.

We provide a PPA (Private Package Archive) with current stable version (ppa:bit-team/stable) and a testing PPA (ppa:bit-team/testing)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-qt

or

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-qt

./makedeb.sh
sudo dpkg -i ../backintime-common-<version>.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../backintime-qt-<version>.deb

Back In Time is available through AUR. You need to import a public key once before installing

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 615F366D944B4826
# Fingerprint: 3E70 692E E3DB 8BDD A599  1C90 615F 366D 944B 4826
wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/backintime.tar.gz
tar xvzf backintime.tar.gz
cd backintime
makepkg -srci

To build and install from the source code do a git clone https://github.com/bit-team/backintime.git on your computer and install the required dependencies before makeing.

The dependencies are described for Ubuntu here. If you use another Linux distribution please install the corresponding packages.

• dependencies

  • python3 (>= 3.3)
  • rsync
  • cron-daemon
  • openssh-client
  • python3-keyring
  • python3-dbus
  • python3-packaging

• recomended

  • sshfs
  • encfs

• Command

    cd common
    ./configure
    make
    make test
    sudo make install
  

• dependencies

  • x11-utils
  • python3-pyqt5
  • libnotify-bin
  • policykit-1
  • python3-dbus.mainloop.pyqt5
  • backintime-common

• recomended

  • python3-secretstorage or
  • python3-keyring-kwallet or
  • python3-gnomekeyring
  • kompare or
  • meld

• Command

    cd qt
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
  

You can use these optional arguments to ./configure for creating a Makefile:

--no-fuse-group | --fuse-group (only COMMON)
    Some distributions require user to be in group 'fuse' to use
    sshfs and encfs. This toggles the check on or off.

--python3 | --python (all)
    Use either 'python3' or 'python' to start Python Version 3.x

Note: The first value is default.

See also common/configure --help? and qt/configure --help

Back In Time has a RSS feed https://feeds.launchpad.net/backintime/announcements.atom

There is a mailing list for people who want to contribute to the development: https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/bit-dev.python.org/

There is a dev-docu on https://backintime-dev.readthedocs.org It's not complete yet but I'm working on it. If you'd like to contribute please add docstrings following the Google style guide and add unit-tests for new methods in common. To run unit-test locally you can run cd common && ./configure && make && make test

_{December 2016}