Scheduled backups: Local & FTP

Question

please forgive if this has been asked/answered before, but I am an Ubuntu noob.

I need to perform 2 types of backups automatically on a weekly schedule:

1. From one local drive to another
2. From a remote FTP to a local drive

Need to backup new/changed files only (possibly a mirror mode: Delete files that don't exist on the source). No need to encrypt/archive - simple copy files/folders as is. Need to send a email on backup completion with the operation summary.

What's the best software/easiest way to do it? Preferable using GUI interface. Thanks!

Answer 1

My suggestion would be rsync. Something like:

rsync -avu --delete /source /backup 

should take care of the local backup. This can be easily automated using cron, for instance, you could put a file in /etc/cron.daily containing this to run a daily backup:

rsync -avu --delete /source /backup | mail -s "backup report" you@somewhere.com

You can get a lot of information on rsync in the man page (man rsync).

As for ftp, I'm afraid the protocol doesn't lend itself too well to what you want; for instance, determining if a remote file is the same as a local one is not too reliable, so you may have to resync everything every time you back up. That said, you could look at wget, with which you can mirror an ftp site like this:

wget -m ftp://user:password@host.com

I realize these are not GUI utilities; sorry, I'm a command-line guy. Plus, if you want to automate this, it's much easier to do that with command-line utilities which are designed to run noninteractively.