Top 10 Must-Have Open Source Backup Tools For Your Server

Backups are important, essential and critical for individuals and businesses. Data loss may occur spontaneously and randomly. Nowadays, the risk of losing data is very high. The causes can be classified into multiple categories. In this article, we share some of the open source backup solutions.

What is Backup?

In the Web Hosting and Information Technology world, the word “Backup” refers to the the process of copying data of any form (files, images, videos, databases) to another location.
Backups allow the preservation of data and the ability to restore it in case of equipment failure, human deleting errors or a catastrophe. Backups can be classified into two types:

Local backups: Usually in the same location as the original data. This can be in the same server for example.
Remote backups: The new copy of the data (backup) is location in a different location from the location where the original data is stored.

Companies usually have their own backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies to help them ensure the continuity of their business activities in case of data loss incident.

Backups can be stored in:

Dedicated backup servers,
Virtual Private Servers (VPS),
Cloud Servers,
Third party backup solutions (dedicated or shared),
Storage devices (USB Keys, Drives, etc),
Home computers and storage devices,
etc.

Backups are part of a global IT strategy, where additional measures (RAID technologies, Highly Available and Redundant Infrstructures, etc) which reduce the risks related to data loss, integrity and avilability issues.

From the privacy perspective, backups can be classified into two categories:

Backups stored in your own infrastructure
Backups stored in third party backup solutions and infrastructure

The choice of the right backup solution depends on your needs, requirements (regulations, etc), budget, technical skills and the context.

If you are considering a dedicated, VPS or Cloud server for your backup solution, check this Servers Comparison Engine to instantly compare server offers worldwide and easily find the best server that fit your needs and budget in the location of your choice.

These are some additional resources:

Q: What causes hard drive failure?

Short answer: Factory defects and vibration. Read more

Some Open Source Backup Solutions:

Solution	Solution Type	Short Description
1- Bacula	Open Source	See below
2- Amanda	Open Source	See below
3- Duplicity	Open Source	See below
4- FlyBack	Open Source	See below
5- Kbackup	Open Source	See below
6- BackupPC	Open Source	See below
7- Fwbackups	Open Source	See below
8- Duplicati	Open Source	See below
9- UrBackup	Open Source	See below
10- Bareos	Open Source	See below

1- Bacula

According to Source Forge statistics (rank and downloads), Bacula is by far the most popular Open Source backup program. It has 2,5 million downloads and thousands of contributors worldwide.

To learn more about Bacula, visit the official website: Bacula.

2- Amanda

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup solution that allows the IT administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media. Amanda uses native utilities and formats (e.g. dump and/or GNU tar) and can back up a large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux or Unix. Amanda uses a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers.

To learn more about Amanda, visit the official website: Amanda

3- Duplicity

Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server.

To learn more about Duplicity, visit the official website: Duplicity

4- FlyBack

Apple’s Time Machine is a great feature in their OS, and Linux has almost all of the required technology already built in to recreate it. This is a simple GUI to make it easy to use.

To learn more about FlyBack, visit the official website: FlyBack

5- Kbackup

KBackup is a backup program for UNIX machines. It supports any OS supported tape drive. It can use tar or afio to create the archives. It can even compress using gzip. It supports include lists, exclude lists, and even backing up to a file.

To learn more about KBackup, visit the official website: Kbackup

6- BackupPC

BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up to a server’s disk.

To learn more about BackupPC, visit the official website: BackupPC

7- Fwbackups

fwbackups is a feature-rich user backup program that allows you to backup your documents anytime, anywhere. It is completely free to download and use without any sort of trial or restrictions. In fact, fwbackups is open-source, which means anybody can use, share it and improve it. If you would like to help develop or test fwbackups, see the developer’s page.

To learn more about Fwbackups, visit the official website: Fwbackups

8- Duplicati

Free backup software to store encrypted backups online For Windows, macOS and Linux

To learn more about Duplicati, visit the official website: Duplicati

9- UrBackup

UrBackup is an easy to setup Open Source client/server backup system, that through a combination of image and file backups accomplishes both data safety and a fast restoration time.

To learn more about UrBackup, visit the official website: UrBackup

10- Bareos

Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a reliable, cross-network open source software for backup, archiving and recovery of data for all well-established operating systems. Emerged from the Bacula Project in 2010, Bareos was and is actively developed as a fork and enriched with lots of new features.

To learn more about Bareos, visit the official website: Bareos

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