Alternatives to LBackup

An excellent free tool which supports full system backups of a wide range of operating systems is Clonezillia.

Should you be interested in performing a bootable backup of Mac OS X system have a look at Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, or the Full System Backup page. Yet another option is a tool such as CounterPart.

If you are looking for an enterprise grade (costs money, supports tape and ACL backup out of the box) backup solution then consider NetVault, CrashPlan or Bru. Alternatively, if you are on a tight budget or would prefer an open source backup solution consider BackupPC, Bacula, Amanda or BAR.

If the event that you are interested a very simple backup solution then consider some of the various *NIX commands. A couple of *NIX tools to consider are afio and tar. When combined with tools such as find you will be able to quickly construct a customized backup solution. If you end up constructing a custom backup script or command we encourage you to submit these to the LBackup project. This is because we are constantly looking for ways to make LBackup more flexible.

rlbackup uses the push backup strategy. It is also an rsync wrapper and supports hard links.

Unison is a great utility for synchronizing directories. The unison guide will help to get you started.

If you like the sound of RSync, but do not really want to edit a text file to configure your backups, then ripcordbackup, arRsync, RSyncX (tutorial), EasyRsync, Backuplist+ or Grsync Mac may be worth a look. In addition, on LINUX there is GADMIN-RSYNC, snap2 and Grsync.

If using RSync directly is preferred, then there are plenty of tutorials and tips available, to help get you started.

Having difficulty keeping an encrypted image in sync across a set of networks, consider duplicity or if re-encryption is a possibility, then ZBackup (mentioned below) could work?

ZBackup is an interesting project which may be used to compliment LBackup or as a backup tool in its own right.

Rsnapshot and Trunkfish are command line tools which produces hard linked backups like LBackup.

BrandySnap is another a perl rsync wrapper which aims to improve on some of the issues with rsnapshot. BrandySnap is still in an early stage of development. However, it shows great promise and has some great features related to pruning!

Link-Backup is a command line tool which deals with file and directory renames. The LBackup team are working to integrate Link-Backup (or the feature set) with LBackup in the future.

rdiff-backup is a command line tool which simultaneously supports both push and pull network backup strategies. In addition, rdiff-backup is very good at only storing the changes between different version of a file. This results in drastic reductions in the amount of space required for the backups when using rdiff-backup in under certain circumstances.

TimeMachine is bundled into Mac OS X 10.5 and later and provides an intuitive GUI for restore operations. If you decide to use TimeMachine then you may also be interested in TimeMachine Editor.

If you would like to run RSync on Microsoft Windows, you could consider installing RSync under Cygwin or you could take a look at DeltaCopy, nnBackup or NasBackup.

StoreBackup Some similarities to LBackup but with some nice features including de-duplication and efficient backups of large files such as virtual machines and TrueCrypt stores.

Revision control systems may also be utilized in a backup strategy. One example is git. However, there are many others.

An example of a backup system which is related to git is bup. If you are dealing with large file sets then it is worth a look.

If you are seeking compression and de-duplication then borg backup is also worth considering.

An excellent commercial solution for Windows backups in many situations is ShadowProtect. An open source solution for Windows backup is BURP.

There are also many cloud centric systems, a handful of which are listed below. This is not to say that LBackup and the alternatives listed above are not capable of backup to cloud storage, it is simply that they are not considered to be cloud storage centric :
- SpiderOak
- BackBlaze

Links to Other Lists of Backup Solutions