vbackup: A little archive wizardry, for Debian fans

As best I can tell, vbackup is not available in Arch, Fedora or OpenSuse. I looked through each of those and found no traces of it. That’s a little surprising.

  

vbackup calls itself a “modular” backup system, but I only find it packaged in Debian and its derivatives. The home page explains that it can duplicate a Debian package list so maybe that makes sense, but the very next line adds RPM support as well.

Perhaps the word just hasn’t gotten out yet.

vbackup claims it can support customizable backup scripts to work alongside its own defaults. And it apparently can back up mdadm and lvm data, and archive MBRs. It also can handle networked backup solutions too, or rely on nfs of scp for remote access. That’s pretty impressive.

My favorite part, of the few parts that I tried, was the setup wizard. For as many other archive tools as I’ve seen in this year-and-a-half adventure, it’s nice to find one that will at least set up a configuration for you, rather than dropping a cryptic configuration file on your lap and tapping its foot while it waits for you to set it up correctly.

In all honesty I didn’t run vbackup completely, and I never got close to restoring anything I did with vbackup. So it may be that in spite of a long list of features, it doesn’t really perform as well as imagined.

If that’s the case, I leave it to you to resolve. 😉