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With the release of OS X Leopard, we saw a lot of interest arise at its Time Machine software, basically a backup system with really nice 3D graphics effects. Personally I have never used it, but I found this great review at Ars Technica as usual. I quote the main idea : “Put simply, Time Machine is a backup and recovery system that people will actually use. It effectively cuts the Gordian Knot of the age-old backup dilemma for normal users: “I know I should back up, but I never do. I wouldn’t even know how to do something like that anyway.”"

So what do we got here on the Linux arena?

Flyback, too soon dubbed Linux time machine, is in early development stage. Tried it, and not convinced. While it does make its job at making snapshots (but not at restoring yet :/), the UI is not nice at all. It is not integrated into nautilus or other components, and the whole-system-backup usecase seems not covered. But as I said, this is still alpha.

TimeVault, in alpha stage too, seems more advanced. I have not tried it, but we can see on these screenshots that we have some integration on nautilus and a system tray notifier. Still, IMO, the UI is not user friendly : just look at the snapshot browser and the property page…

And some others command line utilities like Dirvish, rsnapshot, pdumpfs, glastree…

So at the end, the situation is like what we often see in the FOSS world. Technically speaking, we have everything. I have not tried the command line utilities but no doubt they do their job real nice. We just don’t have :

1. A simple and user friendly interface, well integrated.
2. A default configuration that just works with no or very minor initial interaction.