Now that my work is fully shifted to ubuntu, I thought the time is ripe to set up a backup process. Under XP such thought never occurred to me as it would have meant a pricy investment on software, I used to keep a copy of my files in different drives/CD and that’s all the backup I had.

Ubuntu like all linux distro’s are shipped with some pretty decent backup programs. As I am using it for my laptop, I settled for a simple GUI based solution, aptly name simplebackup 

My default installation had skipped it, with synaptic installing the software from Ubuntu repository is a simple job and took me 10 min. More I use synaptic, more I appreciate the logic of keeping central repository of software. Had I kept the software in my CDs, probably it would have taken more time just to locate the right CD.

To start with I selected the default option and changed a little bit to include/leave some directories. Selected the back policy for 15days full update and daily incremental update, and saved the profile. The whirr of my HDD told me, the first backup process have started. It is nice to know that the data will be saved without fail and without me bothering about it.

In about 20 min I found the data is backed up in my /var/backup directory. For additional safety I thought to make a copy in my external HDD. But it won’t write to NTFS partition created by XP. To my surprise, XP only allows NTFS creation for USB external drives.

I wanted to have my external drive in FAT32, this will allow me to read write both from Windows and Linux. So, I plugged my drive back to my laptop. To edit partition table, I like an utility called cfdisk. This is a console based utility with ncurses interface; loads fast but yet userfriendly. Some how, I can never get to remember all the command line options of fdisk. With cfdisk, one can create partition in almost any file system. Once I wrote the partition table to disk then formatted the disk with mkfs.vfat; Now, I have the USB drive in FAT32 partition. Copied the backup files to my HDD.