MadBuntu

Part 1 Installing Kdar

Kdar Splash Screen

We all are terrible about backups.  Admit it.  You haven’t done a backup in a while.  I hadn’t either.  That is until I discovered Kdar and fell in love.

Kdar is a local backup utility that meets all my criteria.  Most backup programs were way to complex for backing up my local machine and files.  I didn’t want to FTP the backups to a remote machine.  I wanted it to be able to easily do incremental backups.  And damn it, I wanted a GUI.

My backup setup is simple.  I once a month I run a full backup, then every other week that month I run a differential backup.  I save the backups to an attached external and to a removable drive that I store in the fire safe.  Yes, I am aware that this is not a completely bullet proof backup scheme, but it works well enough for me.  Little overhead, little work, and no recurring expenses.

Kdar is the best package I have found for this.  The only problem is that it is not part of the repositories for the most current version of Ubuntu (8.04 as of this writing).  But installing it is only slightly more painful then a normal application.

First off, you need to have the KDE libraries installed, but installing Amarok or any other KDE app from the repositories will get you those so chances are you already have them.

Next we need to install a library that Kdar needs - libdar3c2a.  You can get that here:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/libdar3c2a

Finally we install kdar itself.  Get that here:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/kde/kdar

That’s it.  In the next couple days, we’ll look at doing a full backup, then a differential backup, then how to restore files from an archive.  Stay tuned!