mintBackup to be released this week

One of the brand new mint tools scheduled to be included in Linux Mint 5 is mintBackup, a backup tool which lets you save the content of your home directory into a single file, which you can then easily restore on another partition/computer or wherever you want really.

The tool works fine and is fully stable. It will be packaged in the days to come and announcements will be made for the community to test and translate it.

As the preferred way of upgrading to a newer release is to perform a fresh installation from the CD, this tool will ease the process of migrating data and hidden configuration files.

9 comments

  1. “…save the content of your home directory into a single file,…”

    Maybe there is a benefit to that as opposed to copying the directory. I suspect compression is the key factor here.

  2. It uses tar and gzip to compress the home directory into a tar.gz archive. After that it uses md5sum to sign the archive so that when you restore it, it can ensure the archive is intact.

    Also it’s easier to use than a compression tool as it restores to your home dir, sets the chown for the new user, and it lets you exclude files/folders and add hidden directories.

    In the future it might even let you save the list of packages you’ve added and roll out an apt install for you on the target system (but that’s a root kind of thing so I didn’t want to design it for this release).

    Clem

  3. I realy think that mint tools should have better intergration with the desktop as well. Maybe it would be good to unite all those tool in one “big” piece, and not to have them separatly scaterred througt the interface.

    PS: I’m sorry but may english is a piece of shit.

  4. I think a tool like this is really needed! I am new to linux and I installed mint 3.0 KDE because it had most of what I needed out of the box, but in the meantime I added quite a few packages, switched browsers to opera, installed wine to get a windows app I needed running, and ended up spending quite a lot of time customizing the desktop.

    Now I must say that I would like to upgrade to 4.0 KDE when it gets out (mainly to get Xorg 7.3 monitor hotplugging) but I am very reticent to actually perform the upgrade because I don’t want to spend a lot of time re-configuring the desktop (hell, for some of the settings I don’t even remember what I did and how).

    Since my *nix knowledge is very poor (I am a windows transfuge) a graphical tool that allows me to back up and restore the needed settings would be a godsend (otherwis it would mean having to research what “chown” mean and how to use it)! If it also made a list of the “optional” packages I installed and allowed me to reinstall them from the repositories or mintinstall whitin a single interface if would even be better!

  5. Clem,

    Has there been any progress made here e.g. moving /Home to a separate HDD?

    I apologize for hammering @ this topic, but is has become the “Holy Grail” for me.

  6. Great idea. Would also appreciate a newbie level app with GUI for selective backup of anything anywhere from/to etc3 and NTFS volumes compressed and uncompressed.

  7. I was curious about restoring the backup made with mintbackup. The .backup file is apparently not compressed. tar -zxvf would not restore the backup but tar -xvf did just fine.

    Thanks for the utility. The date and time naming of the file is great. I backup all my dot files and folders. A select all for these would be nice.

    Murray

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