Back In Time

_{Copyright (C) 2008-2024 Oprea Dan, Bart de Koning, Richard Bailey, Germar Reitze, Taylor Raack, Christian Buhtz, Michael Büker, Jürgen Altfeld}

It is an easy-to-use backup tool for files and folders. It runs on GNU Linux (sorry - not on Windows or OS X/macOS) and provides a command line tool backintime and a Qt5 GUI backintime-qt both written in Python3. It uses rsync to take manual or scheduled snapshots and stores them locally or remotely through SSH. Each snapshot is its own folder with copies of the original files, but unchanged files are hard-linked between snapshots to save space. It was inspired by FlyBack.

You only need to specify 3 things:

• What folders to back up.
• Where to save snapshots.
• The backup frequency (manual, every hour, every day, every month).

Maintenance status

A small team (Christian Buhtz, Michael Büker and Jürgen Altfeld) has started in summer 2022 to get things moving again after the development of this project has been dormant for a while. We do the development in our spare time and have to prioritize so stick with us, we all ♥️ Back In Time. 😁

We are currently focusing on fixing major issues instead of implementing new features. If you are interested in the development, please see CONTRIBUTING and have a look on open issues especially those labeled as good first and help wanted.

Index

• Documentation, FAQs, Support
• Installation
• Known Problems and Workarounds
• CONTRIBUTING

Documentation, FAQs, Support

• End user documentation (not totally up-to-date)
• FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
• Source code documentation for developers
• Use Issues to ask questions and report bugs.
• Mailing list bit-dev for every topic, question and idea about Back In Time. Despite its name it is not restricted to development topics only.

Installation

Back In Time is included in many GNU/Linux distributions. Use their repositories to install it. If you want to contribute or using the latest development version of Back In Time please see section Build & Install in CONTRIBUTING.md. Also the dependencies are described there.

Alternative installation options

Besides the repositories of the official GNU/Linux distributions, there are other alternative installation options provided and maintained by third parties.

• @Germar's Personal Package Archive (PPA) offering ppa:bit-team/stable as stable and ppa:bit-team/testing as testing PPA.
• @jean-christophe-manciot's PPA distributing Back In Time for the latest stable Ubuntu release. See PPA requirements and install instructions.
• The Arch User Repository (AUR) does offer some packages.

Known Problems and Workarounds

In the latest stable release:

• File permissions handling and therefore possible non-differential backups
• RTE "module 'qttools' has no attribute 'initate_translator'" with encFS when prompting the user for a password (#1553)
• Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8)).
• qt5_probing.py may hang with high CPU usage when running BiT as root via cron

In older releases:

• Tray icon or other icons not shown correctly
• Non-working password safe and BiT forgets passwords (keyring backend issues)
• Incompatibility with rsync >= 3.2.4
• Python 3.10 compatibility and Ubuntu version

Problems in the latest stable release

All releases can be found in the list of releases.

File permissions handling and therefore possible non-differential backups

In version 1.2.0, the handling of file permissions changed. In versions <= 1.1.24 (until 2017) all file permissions were set to -rw-r--r-- in the backup target. In versions >= 1.2.0 (since 2019) rsync is executed with --perms option which tells rsync to preserve the source file permission.

Therefore backups can be larger and slower, especially the first backup after upgrading to a version >= 1.2.0.

If you don't like the new behavior, you can use Expert Options -> Paste additional options to rsync to add --no-perms --no-group --no-owner to it. Note that the exact file permissions can still be found in fileinfo.bz2 and are also considered when restoring files.

Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8)).

In newer Ubuntu-based distros you may get this warning if you manually install Back In Time as described in the Installation section here.

The reason is that public keys of signed packages shall be stored in a new folder now (for details see https://itsfoss.com/apt-key-deprecated/).

You can currently ignore this warning until we have found a reliable way to support all Ubuntu distros (older and newer ones).

This issue is tracked in #1338.

qt5_probing.py may hang with high CPU usage when running BiT as root via cron

See the related issue #1592

The only reliable work-around is to delete (or move into another folder) the file /usr/share/backintime/common/qt5_probing.py:

mv /usr/share/backintime/common/qt5_probing.py /usr/share/backintime/

Renaming does not work!

Problems in versions older than the latest stable release

Tray icon or other icons not shown correctly

Status: Fixed in v1.4.0

Missing installations of Qt5-supported themes and icons can cause this effect. Back In Time may activate the wrong theme in this case leading to some missing icons. A fix for the next release is in preparation.

As clean solution, please check your Linux settings (Appearance, Styles, Icons) and install all themes and icons packages for your preferred style via your package manager.

See issues #1306 and #1364.

Non-working password safe and BiT forgets passwords (keyring backend issues)

Status: Fixed in v1.3.3 (mostly) and v1.4.0

Back in Time does only support selected "known-good" backends to set and query passwords from a user-session password safe by using the keyring library.

Enabling a supported keyring requires manual configuration of a configuration file until there is e.g. a settings GUI for this.

Symptoms are DEBUG log output (with the command line argument --debug) of keyring problems can be recognized by output like:

DEBUG: [common/tools.py:829 keyringSupported] No appropriate keyring found. 'keyring.backends...' can't be used with BackInTime
DEBUG: [common/tools.py:829 keyringSupported] No appropriate keyring found. 'keyring.backends.chainer' can't be used with BackInTime

To diagnose and solve this follow these steps in a terminal:

# Show default backend
python3 -c "import keyring.util.platform_; print(keyring.get_keyring().__module__)"

# List available backends:
keyring --list-backends 

# Find out the config file folder:
python3 -c "import keyring.util.platform_; print(keyring.util.platform_.config_root())"

# Create a config file named "keyringrc.cfg" in this folder with one of the available backends (listed above)
[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backends.kwallet.DBusKeyring

See also issue #1321

Incompatibility with rsync 3.2.4 or newer

The release (1.3.2) and earlier versions of Back In Time are incompatible with rsync >= 3.2.4 (#1247). The problem is fixed in the current master branch of that repo and will be released with the next release (1.3.3) of Back In Time.

If you use rsync >= 3.2.4 and backintime <= 1.3.2 there is a workaround. Add --old-args in Expert Options / Additional options to rsync. Note that some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Manjaro) using a workaround with environment variable RSYNC_OLD_ARGS in their distro-specific packages for Back In Time. In that case you may not see any problems.

Python 3.10 compatibility and Ubuntu version

Back In Time versions older than 1.3.2 do not start with Python >= 3.10. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with Python 3.10 and backintime 1.2.1, but has applied a patch to make it work. If you want to update to backintime 1.3.2 in Ubuntu, you may use the PPA: see under INSTALL/Ubuntu PPA.

_{Jan 2024}