I do not need to emphasis the important of backing things up; however, sometimes we shirk this responsibility because it can be tedious. This is where Simple Backup can come in handy. Essentially, it is a simple cronjob scheduler GUI designed for backing up specific files and directories. I downloaded the deb package and installed on Debian.

sudo dpkg -i sbackup_0.10.5_all.deb

Once done, I opened Simple Backup Config from the settings menu. In the General tab I selected Use custom backup settings. From the Include tab I removed the defaults and added my document directory. I did nothing in the Exclude tab. In the Destination tab I set it to a remote directory and accesses my private FTP account (e.g. ftp://username:password@example.com/). The Time tab was adjusted to backup daily with the simple option selected. Nothing was done in the Purging tab. Once finished I clicked Save and Backup Now! I was told the PID of the backup processes so I could  kill it or monitor it.

I checked my ftp directory, and found a new directory created with today date, Inside where all my documents compressed in a tarball. To restore I used Simple Backup Restore from the menus. Now I have daily backups of my documents onto a remote server and don’t have to think about it. I don’t know how many times I have inadvertently deleted something I was working on and have to start from scratch, or even worse suffered a hard drive failure during finals week!