The Verdict
GUI backup tools
After assessing the results of this month’s Roundup, it’s our opinion that Vorta offers the best balance of sophisticated features that are accessed through a pleasant user interface. It’s also reassuring that it sits on a wellmaintained backup tool called BorgBackup. This means that every time BorgBackup gains a new feature or has a bug ironed out, Vorta also gains that improvement too. Additionally, if Vorta were ever to be abandoned then you’d still be able to access old backups, thanks to BorgBackup.
The Vorta user interface is neat in appearance and efficient in use. We reckon that most users could be up and running with it fairly quickly. We liked the option of mounting the backup snapshots within the Linux filesystem so that you can use a standard browser and other Linux tools to access the contents.
The facilities of Vorta worked as expected in our tests. We backed up an entire system to a network shared drive and it took just over an hour. The following day, it took four and a half minutes to do an incremental backup with 1.7GB of extra data. Diffing the snapshots showed that the bulk of that extra space came from virtual machine snapshots that we had created.
BackupPC is the closest we came to examining a backup tool that’s aimed at enterprises rather than individual users. However, there’s no reason why home users or organisations running a small number of machines shouldn’t use it if they’re prepared to hit the manual first. For some, being able to access the software remotely over the web will make the extra work of setting it up more than worthwhile.
On the other end of the scale, Deja Dup keeps things simple, but for many it’ll offer everything they actually need. However, if you need a feature that isn’t provided then it’s almost impossible to expand on what’s already there.
We were a bit disappointed in the cloud features because the three programs that offered support for remote backup all supported different things. If it’s an important area to you, then you may have to make the decision based on what cloud services you’re tied to.
Grsync is a useful piece of software, and we’ve no doubt that some Linux users use it as their primary backup tool. However, it didn’t feel much like a backup tool for day to day use. Although not as flexible for the technically minded, Back In Time also sits on top of rsync and offers all of the facilities that we expect from a user-oriented backup tool.