Apple's "Time Machine" Now For Linux... Sort Of 425
deander2 writes "Apple's 'Time Machine' is cool, but I use Linux, not MacOSX. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less."
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
So ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes you wonder ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Completely misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had backup systems for decades. Even Windows has a more functional system than Leopard by accounts I've read. What Leopard did is make backup and restore sexy to the point that people will actually want to do it.
"Flyback" is a replacement for, well, I'm not sure what. It's certainly nowhere near Time Machine whose primary innovation was "damn gotta get me that" user-friendliness.
Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if this "Time Machine for Linux" implementation is as easy to use or not, but the real thing that makes Time Machine cool is that even my mother can use it.
The Ars Technica article about Leopard has lots of very cool details about Time Machine in it, including how it works. (It uses hard-links, including hard-links to directories, so in each and every time-stamped folder on the backup drive, you have a *FULL* copy of your HDD at that time (minus anything you excluded from the backups). Read that portion of the Ars Technica article if you want answers to questions about it.
"something like"=/=real thing. technology missing (Score:4, Insightful)
this one has many advantages over timemachine (Score:1, Insightful)
Rsync backup is not Time Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
No end-user is going to put an rsync script in their cron jobs and specify in what mounted partition to store it and then later use rsync to restore the specified files. -- if an end user understands at all what I just said of course
Time Machine's interface is revolutionary. It gives you a way of looking back in time at your own computer and does it in a fancy way consistent with the interface. It does so for any Time Machine enabled application including Mail, Address Book, i*. If you have to restore a piece of mail from backup I doubt you'll know the name of the file it was stored in rsync or any other type of backup let alone knowing how to restore it without removing all the new messages.
Why did we always have to be bashing users for not creating their backups again? Because it was too difficult and too time consuming to make them. Time Machine takes literally 30 seconds to set up and the rest is automated. That's why people will start making backups. It's not difficult anymore and it's going to save me a lot of headaches.
Just my 2c.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, without such a method for watching FS changes as they occur (or later, from a log), any hackish solution will fall far short of Time Machine's performance.
Apple is brilliant (Score:2, Insightful)
All linux users should tip their hat to Apple for renewing the interest in better backup solutions.
This is why free software rules.
And also why we need companies like Apple who raise the bar.
Recovery tool is better than a backup tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rsync is to data what duct tape is to... well, everything else: it might not be pretty on a visual basis, but you'll be damned to find a better solution on a bang/buck basis.
Most geeks are pretty happy with duct tape and rsync. This will be difficult to change because geeks, nearly by definition, can see beauty beneath an ugly fascia.
Re:Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know whether this Linux implementation does something like it, but what I like most about Time Machine isn't the interface. It's the fact that the backup utility takes care of disk management automatically.
My current backup strategy works something like this:
If I were smart and vigilant, I would catch when the archive reaches about 30 GB, and create a new one then, so that managing older archives could be done in more tractable chunks. If I were rich, I would just buy a number of external drives that I would rotate as they filled up. But I am apparently neither, so I just get stuck in this cycle in which I only have a current backup 1/3 of the time, and older archives are randomly discarded or distributed wherever I can find the space.
The great thing about Time Machine is that it consistently fills up my disk with the most relevant backup data: current backups at a high frequency, and months-old backups at a low frequency. When space runs out, the oldest data gets thrown away, but the quantum chunk is a diff between backups, not an entire 80 GB archive.
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the difference? The interface is how you use software. If it's easy to use, it has a good interface.
Re:No Open Source Invovation here! (Score:3, Insightful)
Which they stole from Xerox. Funny. I saw Woz speak, and he stated the following:
a) they toured Xerox, and saw everything they did, went home, and made it for cheaper
b) Windows "stole" their interface
c) The Creative Labs suit about the iPod interface was silly and unfounded
Hmmm? So any lawsuits AGAINST Apple are silly and unfounded. Those same lawsuits file BY Apple are great and wonderful, huh? Can someone explain this to me?
By the way, I think patenting obvious ergonomic ideas is stupid, and it's not theft to copy an interface. The same way making a car with a steering wheel on the left side is not theft of intellectual property. Apple has, IMO, more mud on their faces because they have the balls to turn around and call themselves moral. And as our president says, "You can't claim the high horse and take the low road."
Not an rsync expert by any means but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, makes me wonder ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or another scenario that's a bit more likely (especially with email inboxes it seems), the mail database gets corrupted, and before you realize it, the automatic backup overwrites the good copy on your backup disk with the corrupt one. I know of a few people this has happened to.
Time Machine is a very good thing, and I commend Apple for it, especially since their old backup app sucked, and wasn't even included in the OS.
Now, how about getting network backups to work properly, and patching Time Machine to gracefully deal with large files?
Re:hard link directories (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Completely misses the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm too lazy to do any research... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, they have a nice sexy inteface (and that's good and all), but in truth there interface isn't really that amazing. For most people, microsoft shadow copy interface is just as usable.
Re:So ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm too lazy to do any research... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, most importantly hard links on directories were added to the OS so that entire unchanged directory trees would not be reproduced. This significantly reduces the number of files needed on the backup drive.
Hard to beat the Time Machine setup scenario: 1. Click the big ON button; 2. Pick a disk drive
Done
Re:Not the interface (Score:4, Insightful)
So it is the interface, then?
I realize the interface doesn't do the heavy lifting in an application, but I wish the FLOSS crowd would finally clue in to the fact that ease-of-use matters. For example, GnuPG is a way to protect your privacy through encryption, but it only has a CLI. GUIs exist for GnuPG, but their installation is complex. Why do people work on GnuPG? Because privacy is important! But who gives a fuck when only 1% of the population can use it? Thanks for nothing, GnuPG!
I have no particular bee in my bonnet about GnuPG, it was just the latest FLOSS effort to piss me off. Open-Source software and "Free as in Freedom" are ideas too important to be relegated to the technical elite, but the technical elite's refusal to make their tools easy enough for the rest of us cuts out most of society. You have the cure for cancer but refuse to give it to us because we don't have the time or desire to learn Perl.
This Linux "Time Machine" sounds cool. Too bad I'll never be able to use it. Bah!
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you deleted that email you really wanted, or made a bad edit to a contact in your address book, or a photo in iPhoto/Picasa? These apps store lots of data in some kind of database. As a geek, you know that you need to find this database, move the current one aside, restore the old one, export the content you want from the app, move the current database back into place, and import the content you just extracted from the old database.
With TM, Your Mom opens Mail, and presses the TM button. She gets the same 'windows through time' view, listing her mailbox at each checkpoint. She selects the message(s), and hits the restore button, and it gets brought into the current database. She doesn't care how it gets represented on disk.
See this screenshot: The user isn't browsing files, they are browsing contacts: http://scrap.dasgenie.com/images/017-TimeMachine.png [dasgenie.com]
TM is implemented as file-based backup (with a few less common twists), but that isn't how the UI presented to the user. Without the UI, it's Yet Another Backup Solution.
What's so new about Time machine? (Score:4, Insightful)
Both of those windows-based solutions, which have been out for quite some time, allow you to restore an individual file or folder from a wide range of dates. My setup backups files at midnight and 9am everyday, and I can any version of a file going back nearly 3 months. If I were to reduce the backups to once daily, 6 months of version changes on each file is plausible.
example: http://www.steveallwine.com/images/previousversions.jpg [steveallwine.com]
The only arguement I can find about why Time machine is innovative is comparisons between it and system restore on the PC. Since these are two entirely different functions, I don't understand why its brought up.
Re:Why not a simple SCCS? (No use git) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Time Machine's ability to simply browse backwards through time in the folder, whilst still having the folder functionality usable is far beyond BackupPC. Indeed I bet there are many times that you just want to do this, you don't want to restore the file or the folder as it was then, you just want to quickly glance inside the file as it was.
There's nothing amazingly clever about Time Machine, but it is Apple "Getting It Right(tm)" interface-wise (excluding silly starfield, etc) and functionality-wise.
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Other Things Missing (Score:5, Insightful)
A number of people have pointed out some of the major deficiencies of this software in comparison to Time Machine. There are a couple of items, however, that no one seems to be mentioning and which I think will have some of the biggest, long term effects. First, Time Machine includes easy APIs so that other programs can access the stored data from within their application. Second, it is included in the standard install so developers can rely upon it being there.
Why does this matter? Think of all the applications in which versioning would be really nice, but it just isn't available. Your address book, for example can look up old contacts or numbers or addresses. Your development tools can automatically load an older, version of that code you're writing to recover that function you did not think was needed anymore, even if you did not write it to a versioning server. Your video games can take you back to older saved games or versions of characters before you sold that really cool item. Photoshop, Word, OpenOffice, etc. can use it to revert changes to a file all the way back to last month.
The difference is that while many users will never take the trouble to learn how to use a backup system and properly recover an old version of a file, they might trouble to plug in a Time Machine drive and then use the interface to backed up versions from with their applications. It seems strange that everyone is ignoring the cool new API for developers and concentrating on the integration in the finder, which will probably be the lesser used portion of Time Machine.
Re:What's so new about Time machine? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Eh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why on earth did MS's marketing not run with this feature and rename it 'super duper time traveler'...
Re:What's so new about Time machine? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Eh... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Vista's actually does work that well, then you've asked a very interesting question.
Somehow, though, I don't think Microsoft suddenly woke up and figured out how to actually be fanatic about making minor hassles vanish. I'm betting Vista's feature works that well *after* you mutter the right keyboard and mouse incantation, with a lot of "well, of course"ing from people who just overwhelm them (the hassles) with competence, from the user side of the equation, and simply cannot comprehend the notion of doing it from the software end.