Scheduling

Can the software back up while also fitting in with your work routine?

Most people benefit from a scheduling routine when it comes to backups. Ideally, it’s useful to be able to specify the time of backup in order to avoid busy periods. In addition to the built-in scheduling, all of these programs can be controlled via a cron job, if you know how to set that up on your system. However, we can’t give the same marks for a program that relies on doing this as opposed to built-in scheduling.

Grsync doesn’t support scheduling via the user interface, but a specific profile can be run using a cron job.

Like most of the program’s functionality, Deja Dup certainly keeps things simple when it comes to scheduling. You can specify ‘Back Up Automatically’ in the preferences and then select either daily or weekly backups, but you’re unable to specify an exact time – so no archiving can take place in the dead of night while you’re asleep, for example.

Vorta’s scheduling options are a tad limited; they’re focused on daily backups. However, you can specify what time the backup will occur. Vorta has to be running for the backup to occur.

BackupPC enables you to specify separate schedules for full or incremental backups. You can get a bit more complex than the other options because you can specify ‘blackout periods’. This means that you could, for example, exclude certain times of the day on certain days such as weekdays.

Back in Time offers simple preset scheduling options, such as ‘every day’ or ‘every week’ from a drop-down list. There’s also a custom option that makes it possible for you to specify multiple periods such as a set number of hours apart, but we would have preferred less-constricting scheduling options.