FOSSwire

Backing up generally isn’t a fun activity, but always proves to be worth it when that disaster you are not expecting happens.

Building a backup strategy can be a relatively complex process as well. What exactly should you back up, what format do you use, where do you store the backups? It can quickly become a task that demands quite a lot of technical expertise without the help of a program to make things relatively easy.

Back in Time is a solution for Linux, somewhat modelled on Apple’s Time Machine backup system for Mac OS X Leopard, but it also inspired by a few other Linux backup tools.

It has a nice GUI interface, supports automatic backups at time schedules you specify and keeps multiple snapshots of the whole backup, while only backing up the changed files each time. So, what is it like to actually use?

For the purposes of this review, I’ll be looking at the GNOME interface version, but much of this should follow the same for the KDE interface as well.

Setting Up

When you first launch the program, you are presented with the settings window. You do have to set up a location to back up to and which folders to include in the backup (the Include tab).

This does require you to have spent some time thinking about what you need to have backed up first, and the multiple tabs across the Settings window could be a bit intimidating for the new user.

If you are confident with what you want to set up, however, you can quickly set the base directory for your backups (which is probably on an external disk somewhere), the files you want to include in the backup and any advanced settings if you want.

It would be nice to have a couple of preset backup profiles for people who really just want to click one button and have their system backed up. For example, a preset which backs up your home directory to an external disk would be nice to have in a one-click configuration.

Despite the complexity of the settings window for new users, it is really quick and easy to get started.

Running a Backup

Supposedly the application will backup on an automatic basis, based on the schedule you set earlier. I have to admit, I don’t leave my backup drive plugged in all the time, nor do I have Back in Time open all the time, so I haven’t actually tried this out.

Doing a backup manually is a really easy process. In the Back in Time interface, you can simply press the large Backup Now button and it gets to work making a new snapshot.

Back in Time uses rsync underneath to backup only the files that have changed, but you don’t really need to care how it works. You press the button, it works out which files have changed, and makes a new snapshot on your backup disk. It really is effortlessly simple and I like it.

Restoring Files

What I really love is that Back in Time’s snapshots work just like a normal hierarchy of folders on your backup disk. Each snapshot appears just like a folder containing all the files you have chosen to backup, so even if you want to restore a file on another machine where you don’t have Back in Time, you just copy a file across. Again, it just works. (It uses hard links, so it only uses the minimum space

Of course, Back in Time allows you to restore from within the Back in Time interface, it is again really easy to do. All of your snapshots are listed across the left hand side and you can pick one, browse through the file system and bring a file back by clicking the Restore button.

Conclusion

Having played with this for a while, I’m really impressed. There are areas, particularly initial setup, that could be made a little bit easier for new users.

Apart from that, this is a really robust and effortlessly simple way to back up your home folder, for example. Its snapshot functionality works really well, meaning you can have as much or as little backward history of your system as you need, while also keeping a copy of the whole system.

I love the fact that it requires very little effort on my part to update my backup – I just plug in the drive, launch the app and click Backup Now.

I also find it very reassuring that the files aren’t in a weird format which has to be decompressed or manipulated by a program; they’re just files sitting there on the disk that I can access.

I’ve found Back in Time to be really useful as a backup solution for my home directory on this machine. It’s not powerful enough perhaps for some requirements, but if you are using Linux as an everyday desktop machine and have some files you need to get backed up, give Back in Time a try.

The web isn’t just about static web sites anymore. Web applications, like Google Docs, Gmail and many others, are extremely popular.

But confining an important application inside a browser window means that web applications feel like second-class citizens and can get lost amongst the browsing that you are doing.

Site-specific browsers (SSBs) are designed to solve this problem. The idea, as the name suggests, is to create a browser specifically for each of these applications. The web app then exists in its own window and has its own space on your desktop.

Prism is Mozilla’s site-specific browser offering. Prism is based on Firefox, sharing the Gecko rendering engine, meaning it should have excellent compatibility with even the fussiest of applications. Like Firefox, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X natively.

There is both a Firefox extension and a standalone application available which allow you to create SSBs. With the standalone application, you simply launch it, enter the URL of the application you want to use (for example, Google Calendar would be https://www.google.com/calendar), set a few other settings and click OK.

And that’s it! You now have a site-specific browser for that app. It can exist alongside every other desktop application on your machine and feel like a real application, rather than just something that has to hide away in a browser tab.

The Firefox extension works in a very similar way, but makes it even easier. It adds an option to Tools > Convert Website to Application, so you can simply browse to the website in question, issue that command and create an SSB.

If you like working with applications in the cloud, but prefer to not have to live entirely in your web browser, site-specific browsers and Prism might be interesting to play with.

Continuing the recent trend of posts about email client and personal information manager (PIM) software, this post will look at the Lightning extension for Thunderbird.

Mozilla already make a standalone calendaring client called Sunbird, but what if you prefer having all of your information in one app, perhaps like GNOME's Evolution, but want to remain cross-platform (which is more difficult with Evolution)?

The Lightning extension brings Sunbird's calendaring functionality and places it into Thunderbird. Despite how cut-and-paste that may sound, it works rather well; you access the Calendar module from a switcher at the bottom of the sidebar.

The Lightning extension is available for all the platforms where Thunderbird can run. Linux users should first check their package manager for lightning-extension or similar (and beware that installing in this way will install it for all users).

Or, you can install it by browsing to the add-on page for Lightning in your web browser, downloading the extension and installing it into Thunderbird.

Once you've downloaded it from that page, go to Tools > Add-ons in Thunderbird, click Install and locate the downloaded file.

If you're a sucker for an integrated PIM solution, but want the universal platform flexibility that Thunderbird offers you, Lightning is an excellent solution for adding calendar into the mix.

As an added bonus, because Lightning is based on Sunbird, you can do cool things like, I don't know, direct access to Google Calendar with CalDAV.