How To Do Backup In Linux Mint Using ‘Back In Time’

‘Back In Time’ is a  backup utility for Linux Mint / Ubuntu. It can perform snapshot backups of specified folders. It is based on rsysnc, diff and cron. Here’s how to install and use it in Linux Mint / Ubuntu:

1. Issue the following command at the terminal-

sudo apt-get install backintime-gnome

[KDE users use ‘sudo apt-get install backintime-kde‘]

2. After the installation is complete, click on ‘Menu>System Tools>Back In Time’ to start the application.

3. In the ‘Settings’ window that shows up, choose the location where you want to save the snapshots. We recommend that you save this to an external media. Also, you can choose to schedule the backup job to run at a specified interval (ensure that the external media to which snapshots will be saved is connected when the backup job is scheduled to run).

4. In the ‘Include’ tab, click ‘Add’ to specify the folders which you want to backup.

5. Navigate into the folder you want to backup and click ‘Open’.

You can add multiple folders as shown above. After you’ve added the folders, verify the settings in the ‘General’ tab and click ‘OK’.

Click ‘Yes’ to confirm that snapshots folder is being changed.

6. Click ‘Save Snapshot’ button to backup the previously specified folders.

7. You can click on a saved snapshot and view the files saved in that snapshot-

You can also browse to the ‘backintime’ folder on the media being used to save the snapshots and simply browse and copy the file(s) you need to restore. [NOTE: Do not make any manual changes in the ‘backintime’ directory, it’s sub-directories or any files inside ‘backintime’ and it’s sub-directories]