Safe Circuit

Getting Started with Redo Backup

Redo Backup also provides support for other admin tasks. The sparse user interface provides an overview in stressful situations and is also useful for providing phone support to non-experts without being able to see the remote screen.

If booting the Live CD takes too long for your liking, you can transfer the Redo Backup image to a USB stick. The developers recommend Unetbootin [4] for this, but the Live CD also comes with the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator, another useful tool for this purpose.

Once the computer has booted from the Live CD or USB medium, Redo Backup automatically starts the GUI to let you back up or restore the built-in data medium. The GUI does not let you switch the keyboard layout. This can be a pain for users who work with non-standard keyboards – in particular, because of the frequent use of characters such as / in paths. If you don't use a US keyboard layout, you can switch to another layout with the setxkbmap XX command, however.

If you want to follow the output from Redo Backup in detail, launch the backup program in a terminal window with redobackup. The steps are self-explanatory: Backup does precisely that to the entire disk, dumping all the partitions and the master boot record onto a locally attached USB hard drive, a network drive, or an FTP server. Restore does precisely that with a previously created backup on one of these sources. This process is easy and reliable through the GUI; however, depending on the size of the backup, both a backup and a restore can take several hours to complete. A typical Windows 7 default install with Office but without extensive data can be backed up and recovered in a couple of minutes, though.

Conclusions

Redo Backup provides a bare-necessities user interface for less experienced users. It sacrifices some features, such as backing up individual files in favor of precise and reliable handling of its main task: disaster recovery. For more information, see the "Alternatives to Redo Backup" box.