Back In Time
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Version: 0.7
License: GPL2
Rating: 
It’s always nice to be able to undo things. In real life, particularly, but that usually isn’t an option.
With computers, though, it is! Most software (particularly word processors and office-type stuff), nowadays, features an undo button; allowing you to revert things to the way they were before. But what if you don’t realize you’ve totally messed things up until a week later? After you’ve closed all applicable applications or permanently deleted files?
That’s when it’s time to click that system-wide undo button — and run Back In Time.
Back In Time is an automatic backup system, that, once properly configured, will take snapshots of those directories you want protected at regular intervals. Whether you’re working on a complex project and want to keep track of your revisions, or just had your hard drive fail beyond any hope of recovery and want to recover your data (provided you had Back In Time configured to save backups to an external medium), or even are feeling nostalgic and want to see what your home directory looked like way back when — Back In Time is a nice thing to have installed.
There are three different downloads available on the Back In Time homepage, to choose from. For most people, downloading the source will be the best option. If you run Ubuntu, or some other dpkg-using distro, you might prefer the .deb package, for easy installation. And if you run Ubuntuand speak French, there’s a package specifically made for your unique needs.
But even if you get the source code, don’t think you’ll have to compile anything! Back In Time is written in the Python language, so all that’s needed to install it is to run sudo ./install.sh. This will copy the necessary files to all the necessary places, and then you’re ready to run! You can find Back In Time under the Administration section of your application menu, or alternately can run the command backintime from a shell.
And I ought to mention here that this latest version of Back In Time adds complete multi-language support. To install it for non-English use, you can run the commands ./translate.sh and sudo ./install_locale.sh fr. Once there’s more languages available, you’ll be able to replace that ‘fr’ with the abbreviation for the language of your choice. However, there’s nothing to stop you from translating it yourself, either! All you have to do is edit and rename the fr.po file found in the /po directory to reflect the language you’re translating Back In Time into.
When you first run Back In Time, you’ll be shown the Settings window. Here you can configure Back In TIme to do what you want it to. You can choose what directories to back up, what filename patterns to exclude in that backup (for example, if you don’t want to back up hidden files and folders), and where you want to snapshots to be stored. If you’re trying to protect your data against hardware failure, then I highly recommend choosing a flash drive or secondary hard disk for keeping your backups on. This way, if your primary medium dies, you’ll still have a copy of everything important on your backup drive. If you just want to keep track of revisions to your work, though, it doesn’t really matter where you put the backups, so long as they aren’t within any of the directories you’re actually backing up (which could possibly create both a paradox and an infinite loop, filling up your storage space and inverting the universe all at once). In fact, Back In Time will specifically prevent you from doing anything so foolhardy, so you’ll be able to rest easy at night.
Also on the settings screen, you can choose the interval at which automatic backups are taken, ranging all the way from never to once a month. But even if you choose to back things up once an hour, you don’t have to worry about needlessly wasting storage space — Back In Time is smart enough to not take snapshots when there haven’t been any changes made since the last backup. And for even greater hard drive conservation, you can tell Back In Time to automatically deletebackups it’s taken, once they exceed a certain age, or once the free space on your drive shrinks beyond a certain amount.
Then, once you’ve got all that taken care of, you can do . . . nothing! Yes, that’s right — you can close Back In Time and worry about data loss no more, in the assurance that every revision made to your filesystem is preserved. Back In Time uses cron to make sure it’s run, silently and in the background, as often as you told it to be. Unlike so many regularly recurring programs on thatother operating system, Back In Time takes up no resources whatsoever when it’s not in the actual act of backing up your data, since it’s not even running; and even when it is doing that, it only uses leftover processor power to do so, so that it doesn’t slow your machine down!
If you want to, though, you can take an active part in the life of your backup system. If you’re a real Scrooge when it comes to your storage space, you might want to tell Back In Time to never automatically back up your data at all, and just press the Backup Now button in the upper left corner of the window, yourself, whenever you think it’s needed.
Besides the toolbar at the top of the window, the main Back In Time interface is divided into three panels. On the left you’ll find a timeline, showing the date of each backup on your system. In the middle portion of the window is a list of the places you’ll most often want to access — the root of your filesystem, your home directory, and each of the places you told Back In Time to back up on occasion. The rightmost space shows the contents of the directory currently selected in the middle panel, at the time in history selected in the leftmost. You can browse through this area just the way you do in your file management program, and even double-click on the files listed to view them in their associated programs, as they were at the time of your backup.
And then, in the upper right corner of the window, you’ll see the Undelete button — the button that allows you to undo all user errors, hard drive failures, and other modifications that have taken place since the currently selected backup, and change things back to the way they were.
And with that, your backup system is complete.