Backup control
Show ‘em who’s boss.
Virtually all backup tools are more or less similar in terms of features. Although, of course, there has to be an exception and that’s DéjàDup. This tool enables you to backup individual files as well as complete directories. Using DéjàDup you can only back up complete folders and not individual files. Another area where DéjàDup loses out to the competition is in its inability to create multiple backup sets. In stark contrast all the other four tools: Areca Backup, Back In Time, Gadmin-Rsync and LuckyBackup, you can backup different sets of files and directories by creating different profiles and backup sets.
Furthermore, the tools also enable you to fine tune the backup list by specifying patterns for including and excluding files. Areca Backup can filter files by file extensions, date or file size, and you can even ask it to exclude locked files or special types, such as pipes and sockets. Advanced users can enter regular expressions as exclusion criteria that can be applied to either files or folders or both. You can even combine any of these filters for more granular control over the type of data you wish to back up.
Similarly with Back In Time, you can specify the files you don’t wish to back up. The application contains a list of common patterns for files that should be excluded and you can also manually specify your own patterns, files and folders and even exclude files that exceed a particular size.
LuckyBackup too has a number of predefined checkboxes for excluding common gunk, such as cache folders, trash, temporary folders and other locations and the application also allows advanced users to define their own exclude list.
Gadmin-Rsync also allows you to specify patterns for including or excluding particular files, but this process has to be done manually as the application doesn’t provide the convenience of preset patterns such as those in Back In Time.
All of the backup tools have advanced control features, which enable you to back up to a remote location. Areca Backup can do a save to recover from remote locations us ing either FTP or SFTP connections. Back In Time can back up files remotely via SSH connection. Similarly, Gadmin-Rsync enables you to set up local to remote backups (or vice versa) which it does via SSH connections. Similarly, LuckyBackup too can use a remote location as a backup source as well as destination. However, Déjà Dup aces all the other tools by supporting the largest number of network protocols, and using the application you can connect to remote FTP, Samba, SSH and even WebDAV shares.