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Windows has this great file copy application - YCOPY. I have been looking for some similar application for YEARS. I would think that a YCOPY like app. would be desirable. All/Most of the back up application mung on the files *.gz being the one that is encouraging me to write this. I want a copy of my files not a munged/backup. I want to be able to go to my YCOPY/stored files, search of the named files, find them and open them. NOT upload the Gigabytes of files to some computer (wait, wait some more, go to sleep and hopefully wake up to find the restore done) and then search for the desired file. Does anyone know of a Ycopy application that will work on Ubuntu?

wjandrea
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John Raff
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  • See Comparison of backup tools, unless Ycopy has some really specific feature. – wjandrea Dec 09 '17 at 23:07
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    What features of ycopy do you need? We're not familiar with Windows applications. – waltinator Dec 09 '17 at 23:12
  • If you just want to copy files, then you can drag and drop in the gui, or use cp -a on the command line. – psusi Dec 10 '17 at 01:58
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    @waltinator -- ycopy was an old Win98 and XP utility. Normal copy would crash if it could not copy a file; forcing you to search for files that were copied and and restart a new copy for the ones that didn't copy: a very frustrating task. Ycopy was a fix for this problem. Ycopy would log the files that couldn't be copied and continue copying other files. – ravery Dec 10 '17 at 07:31

2 Answers2

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There are several backup programs that can meet your feature desires.

The two I like are rsync and borg backup.

Rsync

rsync is primarily a smart file transfer program. However it has options that can be used to create a bash backup script using; bash, rsync, notify-send, rm. There are plenty of rsync backup script examples posted, roll your own or search for one you like. The code below is included as an example of what options can be used to accomplish using rsync to backup a folder. --link-dest=$DEST is the directory for the old backup, where old files can be found. $HOME_DIR is the directory to be backed up. $BACKUP_DIR is a copy of $HOME_DIR. 

rsync --log-file=$LOG --archive --sparse --numeric-ids --compress --fuzzy --hard-links --delete --one-file-system --exclude=/Desktop/Trash/* --exclude=/.local/share/Trash/* --exclude=/.cache/mozilla/* --exclude=/.ccache --exclude=/podcast --exclude=/Videos --link-dest="$DEST" "$HOME_DIR"/. "$BACKUP_DIR"/.

Borg Backup

borg is a de-duplicating backup program. It has an option allowing you to mount any or all backups as a FUSE file system. Once mounted it would be essentially the same as a simple copy. I currently have 21 backups of my laptop consuming 19.22GB representing 170.39GB. borg info of my latest backup

Duration: 1 minutes 3.54 seconds
Number of files: 11214
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:               13.79 GB             13.00 GB            229.99 MB
All archives:              170.39 GB            158.91 GB             19.22 GB

                       Unique chunks         Total chunks
Chunk index:                   51427               322488
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Starnes
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If you are using the GUI, Grsync (downloadable from the Ubuntu Software Centre) is also excellent for novice users who fear the unknown in the command line.

Whilst Grsync is highly configurable and has the same structure as rsync, it has a logical and easy to follow interface which remembers your settings allowing you to easily set up different backups for different occasions/reasons selectable from within the desktop.

I Can't recommend it highly enough because it is so intuitive and have been using it daily for some considerable time making daily backups to a NAS capturing only changed files.

graham
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