Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux
Features
- Incremental Backup
- Schedule Backup
- Time-machine
Tags
- Backup
- snapshot
- File Backup
Back In Time News & Activities
Recent News
Recent activities
- solandre-wyze-ap-shelta liked Back In Time
POX added Back In Time as alternative to Parachute Backup
POX added Back In Time as alternative to RsyncUI- OpenSourceSoftware added Back In Time as alternative to Restic Robot
Ramon302 added Back In Time as alternative to Crow Backup
What is Back In Time?
Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux, inspired by "
FlyBack project".
You only need to specify 3 things:
- where to save snapshots
- what folders to backup
- backup frequency (manual, every hour, every day, every month)
Back In Time is based on 
rsync and uses hard-links to reduce space used for unchanged files. It comes with a Qt5 GUI which will run on both Gnome and KDE based Desktops. Back In Time is written in Python3 and is licensed under GPL2.
Backups are stored in plain text. They can be browsed with a normal file-browser or in Terminal which makes it possible to restore files even without Back in Time. Files ownership, group and permissions are stored in a separate compressed plain text file (fileinfo.bz2). If the backup drive does not support permissions Back in Time will restore permissions from fileinfo.bz2. So if you restore files without Back in Time, permissions could get lost.
Back In Time information
Developed by
UnknownLicensing
Open Source and Free product.Alternatives
56 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
Works flawless, only thing I'd like to see is a "preview changes" mode, to adjust your ignore-list before actually creating a new snapshot.
I tried Back in Time on my notbook with MX Linux 21.
I had 2x system freeze when using the program. Could only solved by hard-reset of the notebook.
(Note: MX Linux is running without any problem since several months)
Not recommended!
Do you tried to report the problem. The project is active again since 2022 with a new team of maintainers. https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/tree/dev?tab=readme-ov-file#maintenance-status
There is a new release candidate for version 1.5.3.
https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases/tag/v1.5.3-rc1
Back In Time works well for making backups that are simply copies of files. Super easy to get setup, and no issues since I started using it (about a month ago).
For a long time I was using LuckyBackup for my Linux Mint machine, but it wasn't always reliable. I switched to Deja Dupe, which also works well (does its job) but I really wanted something that made simple backup copies of my files. Back In Time is very similar to LuckyBackup but has proven to be perfectly reliable.
Backups take up less space (because of using hard links)
Full featured. Runs on headless server. Very configurable. Good documentation.