Backups are one of the most vital things for every computer user, which most people ignore until they need it!

For example,  I was a system administrator for about 5 years and I had automatic updates in place and I made weekly backups of all the important virtual machines.  When I left the work and the city I told the guy who took over from me to make weekly backups of the virtual machines, but of course, many people don't really care about backups until it is needed.  It was fine for the first 5-6 months until the server crashed and they did not know how to restore the virtual machines and they tried for days, so after 2 weeks we got the servers back up and running if there were backups it would have to take 4 hours, maximum.
They were lucky in this case that we were able to restore the data at all as sometimes data can be lost forever.

Therefore please do not think that backups are not important, because you will regret it later if you do not have backups and it might be too late and you do not want to lose your photos, work, etc...

In this article, we are going to look at two types of backups which any person need and backup solutions.

There are two main types of backups which every user needs (not just one of them), the first are snapshots or restore points.  This is something Linux lacked in for a while is a way to create automated restore points for that they when you by mistake or an update or a package breaks your system and you can restore your system to a place where everything works without touching your files and folders.  Linux Mint 18.3 fixed this problem by putting a lot of work in Timeshift that does exactly that and it is available and easy to use on most Linux Distros.

Now, many people think that system restore points are like backups and that's what the guys at my previous work also thoughts as they made restore points, but if your hard drive crash they are useless.  You can save your restore points on an external drive, and that will help you to make your new system the same as your previous system, but by default, it won't touch or safe your home folder, so all your data will still be lost.
So it is not a backup but a helpful tool.
How to install Timeshift on Ubuntu 18.10


So as we all know backups are copying all data to another place so that if a person's hard drive breaks the data are not gone forever.  There are mainly two different ways to make backups, manually or automatically.  Manually is when you copy data via any method yourself over to an external drive or to another system on your network and Automatically is when your system is being backup hourly/daily/weekly or whenever you modify a file or folder.

I am using a combination of the two methods of backuping, firstly I got TimeShift running on my system, making weekly restore points.  I do a manual backup of my family photos and I do not have them at all on my computer but on two external hard drives and I make a manual backup between the two when I upload photos.  So both drives have exactly the same data and we printed out the main photos into albums which we really do not want to lose.
I use my computer mainly to create videos and blogging and online jobs so I do not have a lot of data, less than 50GB so I use Mega, which is similar to Dropbox but better to sync my data to a fully encrypted cloud.

Mega is a great app backup tool which I use for selective backuping.  Mega has an app how to install MEGAsync that gives a person several great options for backup.  A person gets up to 50GB free when opening a free account and with MEGAsync a person has 2 options, the first option is to do a full sync, but that only gives you one file in your home folder and a person ads all the files you want to backup your data to that folder and only that will be sync.  That is what I am doing.  But if you want to backup your whole home folder, choose selective sync.  Choose your home folder as the folder that you want to sync from your system to any place you want on your mega-cloud.  So everything is automatically synced.  I already did this backup solution for someone I offer computer support.

I do trust Mega as it is a New Zealand based company, fully end to end encryption and focused on security.
How to install MEGAsync on Ubuntu 18.04


The last backup solution which I want to mention is Crashplan Small Business.

I am a big fan of Crashplan, at my previous work we used Crashplan Home over our network, backing up all our computers to 2 designated systems and it saved my life several times I also know of several, security-aware people who have been using Chromebook cloud backup without any issues and always pleasant experiences.  Unfortunately, they dropped the Home addition in August 2018, which for many meant the end of CrashPlan.

However, it is not the end!  They have Crashplan Small Business for $10 a month per device which you want to backup.  This includes unlimited highly encrypted backup to their cloud.  Security is a focus for them and quality of service.  It is very easy to install it on Ubuntu and all Linux distros.  I think it is a pretty great price, but to make it even better they offer a month free trial, with no commitments attached.

For more information and sign up for a free trial please click on the affiliate link here, and support me as well!




The Crashplan Small Business Sign Up Trial will ask a business name and questions like that, but if you just want to use it for home backups, you can just use your name!

The installation process of Crashplan is very simple, a person downloads the package after signing up, extract the package, and run sudo ./install.sh in a terminal inside the extracted package.
How to install Crashplan Small Business on Ubuntu 18.04


I hope you find this article useful and let me know if you have any additional questions!