@tennisfreak312 Same problem that I had when it came to backup-ing, that I switched back to Windows after almost breaking my computer while trying to restore my system... 😅
been running rsync/rsnapshot for like ~ 20 years on server. dropbox and syncthing for desktop/workstation. plus git for projects. never needed much of a desktop backup solution. but i recently started setting up linux desktops for friends & family TM. pika looks like the right tool there. thanks for creating great content!
Right with you, after years of half-assed backup strategies using DAT and CD/DVD-RW, I setup a dedicated rsnapshot box on an SFF system. Dedicated because I realized that I was the primary danger to anything mounted on my primary machines. Quarterly backups to Nov 5, 2004! Admittedly, rsnapshot is not so user-friendly as this tool, but in exchange I can use Linux knowledge to accomplish useful tricks, like moving to bigger drives, mirroring to an offsite archive, and fixing things when something goes awry.
I'm curious, do you encrypt your rsync/rsnapshot backups? I usually make a tar.gz file, encrypt it with gpg and then scp to a server. It has the advantage of being seamless (gpg asymmetric encryption does not require a input), but that does not make incremental backups
@nogesax3535 In my case, I have a local rsnapshot server, 2 external mirrors (rotated off-site once a month), and a Google Compute Engine mirror. All backups are on encrypted filesystems (via LUKS). Encrypting at the file level would be somewhat opposite of how rsnapshot works - not saying it's not possible, just that I worry that it would be hard to manage successfully and reliably while also not leaking data.
in my case no encryption. external hard drive. same disk for almost the full time. replaced once to upgrade size. old WD "Book". so incremental works ofc. backups usually take only seconds.
Not only the topic is interesting. I'd like to acknowledge separately the level of video production with those blur and highlight effects. Does feel classy comparing to our usual YT Linux stuff videos (not that those are necessarily bad, but...). Geez, an instant subscription.
This is one of the very best linux software tutorials I have ever seen. Very detailed but NO fluff and unnecessary "background music". Well done. earned a like and a sub
Anyone who has hearing loss has a lot of difficulty separating the music and the narrative. That is my rationale for disliking "background music". The second reason is that some folks do not know how to level the audio narrative so that it is consistent across the records so you constantly have to tweak the volume control up or down to be able to understand the narrative. Thanks for asking! @wesbryie
I have nothing setup at the moment and this is exactly what I was looking for. A life saver I must say. I also love the open nature of the tool, that it has a simple side and also a full on complex side.
Hey just to let you know that Deja Dup Backup also existed for a long time and similar to this but this tool looks very awesome and probably way better/polished and advanced.
quick tip to pika devs: if you're targeting user friendliness for the interface, maybe don't say 'repository' and just say backup location. not everyone is a developer and knows what 'repository' means. this could cause some mild confusion when they click backup but are then confronted with a question about setting up a repository and going, "huh? wait what's a repository? I just want to create a 'BACKUP' "
100%. I'm a completely new Linux user. Been using it for one week at most. Prior to this, my experience with GitHub amounted to knowing its name. I had also never heard the term 'repository' before, and I'm still somewhat confused on what it means.
@JoinTheClippyRevolutionToday whether 20 years ago or today, the best-selling or most desirable piece of technology is the one that accomplishes the desired goal while requiring the least amount of sleuthing on the user's part in order to use it.
For the longest time I was just stuck with using a mess of an rsync shell script to have some resemblence of version control and such. Been tempted to get into borg but the barrier of entry felt very daunting. Pika on the other hand looks amazing, need to try it out ❤
vorta is a python app. pika backup is a rust app, that means it takes a long time to compile using AUR in Arch Linux :( in my test VM i enabled chaotic AUR for fast install aur precompiled stuff
This was an absolutely brilliant tutorial, thank you. I’ve been using Windows my entire life since the 90s I’m looking to move my main desktop to Linux Mint as Windows 11 is so intrusive. I’ve always had a lack of knowledge on Linux backups as I use Bvckup on Windows, which is very user friendly. Pika looks just as user friendly to me, thanks once again.
in kde systems there is KUP, which makes incremental backups and is integrated with the system itself. The behaviour of KUP is similar to file history in windows, it takes backup on the specified interval and auto detect if the specified drive is mounted or not, if not then it will not do anything and as soon as you connect your drive it automatically take a backup. the ease of use of KUP is identical to file history in windows. You can access kup in system settings in kde and setup multiple schedules if you like
Yeah, I also went with Timeshift for the System and PIka for the personal files. Timeshift saved my ass every-time I tried something crazy enough to destroy my whole system.
I think it is because, the first Video is only a Month ago. It needs a bit of time to gain subscribers. But I think for the short time, that this Channel is active, it gains a much of subscribers. But this Channel needs more subscribers. I already love this Channel
I am using Vorta and it served me well - but pika looks a bit more polished for "simple setup and every day usage" for people who don't want to understand the inner workings of borg. I am happy that you covered it - I will just send anyone I find without a borg backup to watch this video in the future
Thanks for the video and guide, Pika Backup is a nice app. I switched to Linux several months ago and decided to fill the gap in backup coverage. It was not the case when I was on Windows, since it already syncs all the stuff I needed to OneDrive. Btw, bought the same SSD. Love Samsung's memory hardware. Now my data is safer.
Thanks, I was looking for backup solutions for a new Linux installation. One thing though, you don't need to use the time machine interface to browse files, you can just open the backup drive and access one of the time stamped backup sets.
At present, simple does it. Straight forward bash scripts to rsync to a couple of ZFS repositories with snapshots before and after. It may not be the most elegent, but easy to understand, and has got me out of trouble more than a few times.
I would not install or use z. FS on an envy M. ESS d until they fix the piss pour. Random reed and writes performance out of the box by default From what I understand there isn't simple file. Or command that 1 must edit. I think involving something about highsync or usync =13 ...to fix it? I'll just stick to the tried and true ext4
@motoryzen People don't use ZFS for top performance, they use it for data integrity and/or its management features. For what it's worth, ZFS works fine on my NVMe machines (not "piss poor" as you might say), but of course it'll always be slower than ext4 or XFS simply due to the extra checks that ZFS does.
@austinleong3319 yes I know what they use it for but the bottom line is the random reading right performance is so shity compared to the normal standards that we've been used to with nvme technology that it basically defeats the point One and even better analogy to see what I mean go back to dial-up internet
This is a wonderful, and timely video, (for me). I've been looking for something like this since I first started using Linux years ago. I'll be looking forward to setting this up on my system and experimenting with it. It really looks promising. Thanks for making this video. I'll be looking forward to your future videos on the subject. /Bob (A Now-New Subscriber)
Thank you so much for a very good review. Very helpful, indeed! I'd be grateful if you can top this off with a video on Borg backup some time in the future!!! Keep up the good work, your channel is amazing!
I’m glad I bumped into this! Now all I wish to try is, hope it can backup my whole distro and cache files incase if I wish to to move to another distro like popOs to fedora! Gonna check this out. Have gladly subscribed ! Thanks for the video 🎉
Was thinking of Borg right from the start, having used it for the past 6-7 years, and lo it turns out to be a borg GUI! Pika looks like a pretty good tool to get to an initial borg config even for the cli-inclined.
Nice and I like it but I wanted to find a cloud native backup solution in a multi az context. Even if it wasn't useful for my use case I'm happy to have seen that
Since most of my files are kept on cloud services I’ve never worried much about file backups, but I’ve always been concerned about drive failure restorations. So I use relax and recover, I’d never heard about borg and now I can see that relax and recovery can use borg, but I’ll probably set up a pika as well because your video was just so awesome and having iterations of my files can’t be anything but good.
That was informative. I'm using rclone (and RoundSync on Android, which uses rclone under the hood), and some time ago I came over duplicati, trying it out
Auf den Punkt. Kein Stottern. Keine "Ääähs". Keine "Eeers". Einwandfrei gemachter Beitrag, mit dem ich meine Zeit nicht verschwendet habe. Von der Art Vorstellung will ich mehr sehen. You are subcribed! :)
Using restic for my homelab servers. One local hard drive repo receives the files from all the servers. The repo is then synced off-site with rclone. All that process is automated via a few basic scripts. Pika looks very nice for a desktop use case! I wish there were the same UI for restic so I could add a desktop backup to the same repo I already use (though I have limited need for desktop backup, using a dotfile git and storing files on the servers rather than locally)
@bernardcrnkovic3769not them, but not sure, there is also restic-rest server. I suppose in theory it's supposed to be faster. It would mean going through less protocols, too. That is where some inefficiencies can happen with chunking between protocols. I'd be curious in what people find though
I've been running custom backup scripts based on Rsync that also mount and unmount my drives as needed for a file-system check before and after the backups. That has worked fairly well, but as I use custom folder icons, and those config files are located in the root directory, I had to have a "powered -off" backup of my boot drive as well to preserve that information in case of a boot drive failure and I have had a few of those. I downloaded the Pika Backup software and plan on trying that also.
I don't really need a backup solution for home since I use Syncthing on mutiple devices 😅 and every kind of "big data" like films/games I don't feel I need a backup for.
I was using Pika before watching this video for personal file backups and Timeshift for system snapshots
I wish they'd join hands and come up with a unified intuitive interface for both types of backup.
I used Deja Dub instead of Pika but I will try Pika. Deja Dub was just the recommendation in Gnome Software
@nico1337 where do you keep your system snapshot? On an external or separate partition?
@tennisfreak312 on one of my 7 internal drives
@tennisfreak312 Same problem that I had when it came to backup-ing, that I switched back to Windows after almost breaking my computer while trying to restore my system... 😅
been running rsync/rsnapshot for like ~ 20 years on server. dropbox and syncthing for desktop/workstation. plus git for projects. never needed much of a desktop backup solution. but i recently started setting up linux desktops for friends & family TM. pika looks like the right tool there. thanks for creating great content!
Right with you, after years of half-assed backup strategies using DAT and CD/DVD-RW, I setup a dedicated rsnapshot box on an SFF system. Dedicated because I realized that I was the primary danger to anything mounted on my primary machines. Quarterly backups to Nov 5, 2004!
Admittedly, rsnapshot is not so user-friendly as this tool, but in exchange I can use Linux knowledge to accomplish useful tricks, like moving to bigger drives, mirroring to an offsite archive, and fixing things when something goes awry.
I'm curious, do you encrypt your rsync/rsnapshot backups? I usually make a tar.gz file, encrypt it with gpg and then scp to a server.
It has the advantage of being seamless (gpg asymmetric encryption does not require a input), but that does not make incremental backups
@nogesax3535 In my case, I have a local rsnapshot server, 2 external mirrors (rotated off-site once a month), and a Google Compute Engine mirror. All backups are on encrypted filesystems (via LUKS). Encrypting at the file level would be somewhat opposite of how rsnapshot works - not saying it's not possible, just that I worry that it would be hard to manage successfully and reliably while also not leaking data.
in my case no encryption. external hard drive. same disk for almost the full time. replaced once to upgrade size. old WD "Book". so incremental works ofc. backups usually take only seconds.
Hear... hear... #metoo.
Git is the BEST incremental backup tool ever!
And yes, non-incremental backup is done by rsync.
Not only the topic is interesting. I'd like to acknowledge separately the level of video production with those blur and highlight effects. Does feel classy comparing to our usual YT Linux stuff videos (not that those are necessarily bad, but...). Geez, an instant subscription.
This is one of the very best linux software tutorials I have ever seen. Very detailed but NO fluff and unnecessary "background music". Well done. earned a like and a sub
What do you have against background music?
Anyone who has hearing loss has a lot of difficulty separating the music and the narrative. That is my rationale for disliking "background music". The second reason is that some folks do not know how to level the audio narrative so that it is consistent across the records so you constantly have to tweak the volume control up or down to be able to understand the narrative. Thanks for asking!
@wesbryie
same here!
@wesbryie Most of it is GAY...
For real. This is clean. 🧼
Just using rsync. Great video. Thanks
SO... this is a GUI frontend for the actual and awesome borg-backup
GUIs can make a big difference!
I have nothing setup at the moment and this is exactly what I was looking for. A life saver I must say.
I also love the open nature of the tool, that it has a simple side and also a full on complex side.
Thank you. Have been waiting decades to find an easy application to back up under Linux distros using incremental backup options.
Backed up Garuda Linux to my Synology NAS without issues. Thanks for the tutorial 😊
Great vid! Looking forward to the borg vid!
Me too! Borg is really dope
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! They assimilated my people!!!
@dreamsofautonomyI can remove most of your implants and turn you back into a human! RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE!!!
@dreamsofautonomyisn’t Pika essentially a gui frontend for borg?
@Batwam0YES like Vorta is a gui for borg, too
Excellent tool and presentation.
I used Bjorg, but not with so much settings. This is far easier with Pika to achieve a full featured backup flow.
I've been a happy Back In Time user for about a decade. It's rsync-based and a good balance of simplicity and features.
b43xoitnever happened to me and my years worth of backing up and restoring stuff....
b43xoit Considering how much rsync is used in different contexts, that sounds a bit strange.🙂
Very nice job with explaining Pika Backup. Thank you.
Hey just to let you know that Deja Dup Backup also existed for a long time and similar to this but this tool looks very awesome and probably way better/polished and advanced.
I use Deja Dup and it is easy to setup with automatic backups. It is just GUI for tool called duplicity.
@tom3f yeah I know that one, it comes with Manjaro for example, it's not bad 😁
I'm using Deja Dup..no issues so far and very simple to setup.
Great stuff!
@pietraderdetective8953 wait until you need to restore your files with Deja Dup, I switched to Pika
i somehow maged to make my linux mint panic and delete everything now i am here
Nice to see the channel is still going.
Hope is grows.
Wow. What a great solution. Excited to use this. It looks soooo easy.
Great explanation!
quick tip to pika devs: if you're targeting user friendliness for the interface, maybe don't say 'repository' and just say backup location. not everyone is a developer and knows what 'repository' means. this could cause some mild confusion when they click backup but are then confronted with a question about setting up a repository and going, "huh? wait what's a repository? I just want to create a 'BACKUP' "
100%. I'm a completely new Linux user. Been using it for one week at most. Prior to this, my experience with GitHub amounted to knowing its name. I had also never heard the term 'repository' before, and I'm still somewhat confused on what it means.
20 years ago, we’d get a dictionary or a search engine, and see what “repository“ means. ☕️
@JoinTheClippyRevolutionToday whether 20 years ago or today, the best-selling or most desirable piece of technology is the one that accomplishes the desired goal while requiring the least amount of sleuthing on the user's part in order to use it.
I am liking this video because I did not notice the repository language is so natural for us. Good point.
Good point. I was thinking the same thing.
For the longest time I was just stuck with using a mess of an rsync shell script to have some resemblence of version control and such. Been tempted to get into borg but the barrier of entry felt very daunting. Pika on the other hand looks amazing, need to try it out ❤
Another good Borg backup client is Vorta. You can exclude certain folders by making a .nobackup file under the folder.
Love the Star Trek names ❤
vorta is a python app. pika backup is a rust app, that means it takes a long time to compile using AUR in Arch Linux :(
in my test VM i enabled chaotic AUR for fast install aur precompiled stuff
Thank you for making this. This is so much better and easier to use.
This channel is an absolute goldmine wow
Amazing! Thanks for sharing
Very well done! You've gained a subscriber.
I use Rsync, is very good. Excellent videos, have learned a lot.
Super helpful, exactly what I needed while trying this myself. Thank you
I wasn't sold on it until. You showed Pika can browse the archive. Yes please.
This was an absolutely brilliant tutorial, thank you. I’ve been using Windows my entire life since the 90s I’m looking to move my main desktop to Linux Mint as Windows 11 is so intrusive. I’ve always had a lack of knowledge on Linux backups as I use Bvckup on Windows, which is very user friendly. Pika looks just as user friendly to me, thanks once again.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Very useful. Thanks.
Great quality, informative video. Liked it very much!
Helpful walkthrough. Thanks
Amazing video quality as usual 😁
in kde systems there is KUP, which makes incremental backups and is integrated with the system itself. The behaviour of KUP is similar to file history in windows, it takes backup on the specified interval and auto detect if the specified drive is mounted or not, if not then it will not do anything and as soon as you connect your drive it automatically take a backup. the ease of use of KUP is identical to file history in windows. You can access kup in system settings in kde and setup multiple schedules if you like
It also supports making a full backup every time, rather than an incremental backup.
@contrabombarde1216 true, forgot about that, and that is also quite intuitively available
Doesn't seem to be there in Plasma 6
@wanderingpigeon9965 Still on Plasma 5.27, but I really hope they didn't remove it. That would really suck.
Timeshift and Déjà Dup is also good
Looks good.
I'll give it a try.
Pair this with Timeshift and you will have a complete backup system.
Timeshift (or snapper) combined with bootable snapshots makes my ArchBTW feel like DebianFYI.
Great tip! I'm gonna nerd out on Timeshift later tonight.
@snickersanyoneTou spelt DebianFTW wrong 😊
Yeah, I also went with Timeshift for the System and PIka for the personal files. Timeshift saved my ass every-time I tried something crazy enough to destroy my whole system.
Timeshift has saved my butt a few times..... usually mucking around with new GPU drivers.
How the hell do u have so few subscribers, This is some really high quality content. I really look forward to more of your vids!!
Thank you!
I think it is because, the first Video is only a Month ago. It needs a bit of time to gain subscribers. But I think for the short time, that this Channel is active, it gains a much of subscribers. But this Channel needs more subscribers. I already love this Channel
@dreamsofautonomycan u also use the software to restore folders to there diffrent respective locations?
He is also the person behind this channel
youtube.com/@dreamsofcode
Let's say it's not his first rodeo ahahah
Keep up the good job
Because this is his second channel
Great video! Can you do a video about "vorta", also available in AUR. TIA
Another great video, thank you!
Thank you so much!
Thus channel is a gem💎
Please keep up with quality content
Vorta is a good Borg frontend if you use a Qt based DE.
Very nice find
Using Borg since long time using OMV plugin. It’s good to know there’s a gnome UI now!
Oh nice, I have been using duplicity mostly, but this looks really great!
I am using Vorta and it served me well - but pika looks a bit more polished for "simple setup and every day usage" for people who don't want to understand the inner workings of borg. I am happy that you covered it - I will just send anyone I find without a borg backup to watch this video in the future
Excellent! Thanks!
Thanks for the video and guide, Pika Backup is a nice app. I switched to Linux several months ago and decided to fill the gap in backup coverage. It was not the case when I was on Windows, since it already syncs all the stuff I needed to OneDrive. Btw, bought the same SSD. Love Samsung's memory hardware. Now my data is safer.
I gave you a like just because the comic strip at the beginning of the video made my day. LOL
Rsync and Snapper is all I need.
Great video! For my needs I use rsync.
Looks really good. Thanks for sharing.
I use BTRFS snapshots for incremental copies and dd's for full disk images. Scheduled Rsync jobs also work.
awesome video!
Hello.
Thanks for the video.
I was using rsync for years and now i use timeshift on my fedora 40
Thanks, I was looking for backup solutions for a new Linux installation. One thing though, you don't need to use the time machine interface to browse files, you can just open the backup drive and access one of the time stamped backup sets.
Great content!
Awesome tutorial. Excellent work. Like and sub here too. :)
At present, simple does it. Straight forward bash scripts to rsync to a couple of ZFS repositories with snapshots before and after. It may not be the most elegent, but easy to understand, and has got me out of trouble more than a few times.
I would not install or use z. FS on an envy M. ESS d until they fix the piss pour. Random reed and writes performance out of the box by default
From what I understand there isn't simple file. Or command that 1 must edit. I think involving something about highsync or usync =13 ...to fix it?
I'll just stick to the tried and true ext4
@motoryzen People don't use ZFS for top performance, they use it for data integrity and/or its management features. For what it's worth, ZFS works fine on my NVMe machines (not "piss poor" as you might say), but of course it'll always be slower than ext4 or XFS simply due to the extra checks that ZFS does.
@austinleong3319 yes I know what they use it for but the bottom line is the random reading right performance is so shity compared to the normal standards that we've been used to with nvme technology that it basically defeats the point
One and even better analogy to see what I mean go back to dial-up internet
i'd been using rsync but switching to this now!
Pika sounds promising. I've had a good experience with duplicati on desktops, and tar incremental backups on servers.
So you can use timeshift for snapshots on btrfs and Pika for backups. Nice.
You can also use btrfs send/recieve
Timeshift, Deja dup and Lucky backup is both simple, but generally U R right.
Thank you.
Restic with systemd service and timer.
This is a wonderful, and timely video, (for me). I've been looking for something like this since I first started using Linux years ago. I'll be looking forward to setting this up on my system and experimenting with it. It really looks promising. Thanks for making this video. I'll be looking forward to your future videos on the subject.
/Bob (A Now-New Subscriber)
Thank you so much for a very good review. Very helpful, indeed! I'd be grateful if you can top this off with a video on Borg backup some time in the future!!! Keep up the good work, your channel is amazing!
I’m glad I bumped into this! Now all I wish to try is, hope it can backup my whole distro and cache files incase if I wish to to move to another distro like popOs to fedora! Gonna check this out. Have gladly subscribed ! Thanks for the video 🎉
I use rclone with pcloud and icedrive. Will give pika a spin. Thanks for the informative content.
Was thinking of Borg right from the start, having used it for the past 6-7 years, and lo it turns out to be a borg GUI! Pika looks like a pretty good tool to get to an initial borg config even for the cli-inclined.
Every complaint i had with linux backups solved by this one application. Finally!
I used Vorta till today. Indeed Pika is friendly and easier.
I was not aware of borg backup and pika. The next thing on my list was restic.
Recently installed Linux Mint and Timeshift comes with it by default and is also very simple and easy to use
Vorta too uses Borg and I much prefer it - both it and Pika are excellent tho with intuitive GUI and sane defaults making it very user friendly.
I too have not had a proper backup system due to the same reason.
I literally just came back to Linux on my desktop and was in need of a backup solution. Perfect timing
Pika Pika💛
Based on Borg, which is an amazing backup solution.
I use openSUSE TW. Never had to worry about backup.
Wait a minute, is this a different channel
Wow finally! I am using Timeshift but it lacks many features including networkstoring. Going to try this immediately. Thanks, very nice video.
the answer is Timeshift for system restore.
Is there anyone with the "Backup Destination Unresponsive" problem? Did you managed to fix that?
We are the borg. You will be one of us.
Nice and I like it but I wanted to find a cloud native backup solution in a multi az context. Even if it wasn't useful for my use case I'm happy to have seen that
Since most of my files are kept on cloud services I’ve never worried much about file backups, but I’ve always been concerned about drive failure restorations. So I use relax and recover, I’d never heard about borg and now I can see that relax and recovery can use borg, but I’ll probably set up a pika as well because your video was just so awesome and having iterations of my files can’t be anything but good.
That was informative. I'm using rclone (and RoundSync on Android, which uses rclone under the hood), and some time ago I came over duplicati, trying it out
Rsync which runs at night combined with the timeout command.
Can you enable the option to delete the files in destination that have been deleted in origin?
Auf den Punkt. Kein Stottern. Keine "Ääähs". Keine "Eeers". Einwandfrei gemachter Beitrag, mit dem ich meine Zeit nicht verschwendet habe. Von der Art Vorstellung will ich mehr sehen. You are subcribed! :)
Also Kopia is good and have similar features
Using restic for my homelab servers. One local hard drive repo receives the files from all the servers. The repo is then synced off-site with rclone. All that process is automated via a few basic scripts.
Pika looks very nice for a desktop use case! I wish there were the same UI for restic so I could add a desktop backup to the same repo I already use (though I have limited need for desktop backup, using a dotfile git and storing files on the servers rather than locally)
i have very similar protocol, but i use restic copy snapshot instead of rclone. is rclone faster than copying restic snapshots?
@bernardcrnkovic3769not them, but not sure, there is also restic-rest server. I suppose in theory it's supposed to be faster. It would mean going through less protocols, too. That is where some inefficiencies can happen with chunking between protocols. I'd be curious in what people find though
BTRFS assistant and Pika are godlike, easy, fast and efficient to use.
tar or dar work just fine, add rsync or ssh if you need secure remote transmission
I've been running custom backup scripts based on Rsync that also mount and unmount my drives as needed for a file-system check before and after the backups. That has worked fairly well, but as I use custom folder icons, and those config files are located in the root directory, I had to have a "powered -off" backup of my boot drive as well to preserve that information in case of a boot drive failure and I have had a few of those. I downloaded the Pika Backup software and plan on trying that also.
I don't really need a backup solution for home since I use Syncthing on mutiple devices 😅 and every kind of "big data" like films/games I don't feel I need a backup for.
can you do a video on your arch setup? I really want to know how you did it