Introducing BU | A simple USB BackUp tool for Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint 

thanks for all of time joe that you put into these vids and projects i really appreciate it : )

Thank you for all the time you put into these projects/videos

Mr. Collins...appreciate your work and dedication to what you do for the benefit of others ... thank you,, also appears that I'm becoming a geek..lol.. i liked reading the program layout and it made sense to me.. guess its all starting to click in..cheers

I am thankful for the time and effort you give to help others in learning this unique operating system and the addon applications that make the administrative part of the OS as efficient as can be.

Joe, once again you have created a worthwhile process for backups. Your channel has been of enormous help to my efforts on getting better with Linux. Awesome job!!!

Really awesome initiative Mr. Collins, please just keep it up and thank you so much! best regards.

Hello and thank you. I am a retired bench tech and have told this story many time over. I received some of my training from a technical college but dropped out half way through the first year. The good part of the course was on based on outdated information. I learned early on that the only real way to understand computer technology was to read, use and build projects the incorporate what you learned. Your approach is exactly what I'm talking about. If only every person that works with a computer has the opportunity to hear your story. Thank you for sharing. I just found your channel a few months ago and so far have only reviewed this video and 2 others. I have subscribed and will definitely review each of your videos. I hope to be able to provide more comments later on. Until then...

What a great program! Thank you Joe for BU and all your excellent videos. Very clear and informative. I particularly like the fact that BU will delete any files that you have deleted on the source system, which makes for a much tidier backup. Great stuff!

Mr. Collins... I am Grateful for your work i just downloaded this program. You are a Master of your trade! Thank God for your Mind 🥰🇮🇱 Shalom from Israel.💯

Thanks a lot for this, JC! Nice minimalistic backup tool that runs smoothly on my machine - just what I was looking for! :)

Thank you Joe, nice script. Installed it tonight and it worked a treat. Nice and quick. Nice job thanks.

Thanks for another excellent and interesting video.

Thanks for the video, Joe.

7:25. You're welcome xD :P FTr Joe. I sincerely appreciate your content...always. Among YOU, Chris Titus Tech, Wendell from Level1techs, and even Anthony from Linus Media Group...are the reasons why I'm slowly but surely transitioning to linux 100%..hopefully before the end of this year. Cheers.

I'm doing my first backup with BU right now.--Very nice work. Thank you!

I've been using BU a lot. It is working very well. I recommend it!--Thanks, Joe!

Joe, I love your Linux videos - your instructions are clear and you talk at a pace I can understand (I am 70+ and don't hear so fast now). Since the lock-down here in England I made the decision to go over to Linux. It has been an absolute revelation form me just how much better Linux suits me than Windows 10. In a while, with your continued help, I hope to dump MSoft OS's forever. . . . . Great work, Joe!

Thanks for such good tool. Beautiful- I will try it.

Looking good! Keep up the good work!

Outstanding! Good job and thanks for the share!

done fore me.... 1erst time already rock&roll..... great job!

Thanks Will try it out then

thank you 4 the grate work!

Nice one Joe ....and the video too! Although it's always nice to have multiple choices (like we do in Linux in general), doesn't Timeshift do exactly the same thing though? As you know, it now comes preinstalled in Linux Mint, and can be installed on any other distro ...Ubuntu derived or otherwise. No, I'm not stepping on or dismissing your thunder (work). That gets two thumbs up from me, and I'll definitely be taking BU for a test drive, but for now, I'm hooked on Timeshift. It just works flawlessly ...so far. Well done though, and keep up the development. Looking forward to a deb installer soon for BU. :)

joe i love your videos, thankyou. i still have a preference for the way xbt 3.0 is used in the terminal though ....... i know many will disagree with me and thats fine, but xbt works for me ......... thanks again

Great program! I managed to get it working on Fedora. Just had to change all references of /media/user/BU_Drive to /run/media/user/BU_Drive (since that seems to be where Fedora mounts the drive). Only other issue was the dpkg lines that check for and install rsync and less. I wasn't aware of the necessary equivalent for Fedora, so just had to make sure those packages were installed before running then removed those lines to avoid an error.

LOL, take 2 Nice....! Nice redo, just as good as the other video... ; -)

ATTENTION: I accidentally copied an extra 'fi' when I was showing how to make sure the system finds your local bin directory. Just be sure to only copy from the # commented line down and make sure you got both 'if' and the trailing "fi" in there... Thanks.

I am so grateful for your expertise. Is it possible to open the script to learn what you did?

Thanks ! Ideally appreciate your work on this. I've followed along and I'm using a 128gb Patriot usb 3 flash drive and I'm using KDE neon. I did have several partitions on it previously with MacOSX installers etc when I was going to update the hackintosh which I'm now not going to as moving to Linux. So I zeroed it twice and formatted using Disks program as you did and used GPT and ext4 but when I create the partition and mount it it's now showing 109.5gb free of 115gb? And it has a lost+found folder? I googled and that's apparently for any stray files? Is this correct? Surely wiping the drive and cretaing a partition shouldn't take 12gb of the drive? Before I proceed with using it as a Backup drive i'd really appreciate your thoughts. thanks!

Joe, you may have mentioned this somewhere and I just missed it, but there is one thing I encountered in setting up the BU_Drive. The Disks utility errored out when trying to create the EXT4 partition. After that, the flash drive's led stayed on solid whenever plugged in. Somehow it borked the drive, making it unmountable and unreadable. I tried everything I could think of in Linux, Windows, and MacOS to fix it, but to no avail. This made me very leery of risking another drive, but I pressed on as I think this will be a very useful utility. After carefully rewatching the video, I noticed it was not mounted when you established the new EXT4 partition. That may have been where I went wrong the first time, as I made sure it was not mounted when I tried with the second flash drive. It worked like a champ, so if you haven't said so somewhere, it may be worth a mention. Thanks for sharing your work with us. Now that I have the thumb drive set up properly, I will set up your bash script this weekend and back my stuff up. :-) For the record, I did this in my Linux Mint 19.3 system.

Hi Joe, just getting into Linux, and loving your channel. Just one query ..... I created a BU_Drive back up on my WD Passport drive, and everything worked fine. Unfortunately, I then messed up my system, and took advantage of my back up facility. The procedure worked perfect, but I did discover that the SD card which I use for my "Timeshift" records was wiped clean. Is this normal? Perhaps I should have removed the SD card prior to initiating the back up procedure? Much appreciation for your tutorials ... keep up the good work on behalf of us Linux newbies!!

hi Joe love your videos and thx for solving my previous issues. i have recently got a ryzen build i got a ryzen 5 2400g with a gigabyte b450m d3sh mobo. however i am facing a lot of issues with Debian based OS of Linux like mx , mint and Ubuntu issues like my Bluetooth dongle doesn't work or the whole computer freezes when WiFi adapter is tried to connect i cannot even get into grub menu in mint to go back to a lower kernel. however manjaro works fine, but i really like mint and am at my wits end trying to make it work on this hardware without issues. please help if you can thank you and keep up the great work

Just for kicks (and I want to ensure I have my old files) do you think BU could work on Mac? Or maybe I haven't found the program I want yet. I love BU because I can access those files from anywhere....

Thanks for the BU utility and details! What would be the advantage of BU over Timeshift?

Can you make a video about getting a job by learning Linux. What skills do you need to get a job? where do I start? What are the areas available in the market? Your RU-vid channel is what made me love Linux and now I want to move on to another goal: getting a job through what I love to spend my time on. Thank you Mr collins.

Gonna give this a try!....I have two 4TB USB hard drives that I use with Ubuntu's Backup Tool...and I make a backup of everything..and then?..I BACKUP...the BACKUP!...(Hey...you can never be too careful...right!?) But this looks like it runs faster and smoother!...will definitely use anything that makes my backups go faster!! (Ubuntu's backup tool?...takes FOREVER!..)

Everything I was looking for in a backup engine. However, the video explains (if i understand correctly) it backup the entire drive from which the OS stands. What if we have multiple drives? Would it backup the entire mounted drives as well? I run my PC with a 100gb drive for the OS, and then all my actual data is stored on a HDD of 2Tb. What would it back up? Just the 100Go or all 100G+2To?

Happy Holiday Joe, I have a question about BU. How can I use this with Ubuntu Server. Can you please talk about how to use BU on Ubuntu server. how to create a drive so that bu can see it, so that I can back up the user folder.

Joe!! BU user for several years now and it's saved me more than a couple of times . . .but. I AM unable to restore to another machine (like after an upgrade). Same machine name, same passwords (different SID, of course). Where am I going wrong? I have another upgrade coming soon (Mint Virginia) and I'de like to use BU to restore my data.

Is there a video demo of a restore (restore on a different system too!)? I looked, but didn't see it, but I miss stuff . . . .

Can i use BU with solus4? Why not?

Is this a replacement for timeshift? Just thinking would this be able to be use in windows when they update with the Linux in the terminal? That would be great

Nice Work! I use it often, one question, is it possible to exclude some files and folders ? .steam, Downloads ect. are useless to backup.Can you help in this case ?

Great video! Thx! How would you switch to windows 10 from Linux Mint 19.2?

I have a partitioned drive, do I actually have to format the whole drive or just the partition where I want the backup to be?

What if I want to backup on a LUKS+Ext4 drive as BU_DRIVE? would that work to?

Why not turn XBT into into an binary using SHC?, My backup device of choice is a 3TiB Western Digital drive.

Thanks joe I was using this in KDE neon and it's great I'm now using Manjaro is there any way to get it to work with Manjaro? Cheers

Sorry but I saw a spelling error on line 127 of the BU script. Doesn't affect the operation of the script. Thanks for all your work, I have been using XBT for quite awhile and just switched to BU.

Joe - Is there a way to append an argument to the BU command to exclude a specific folder from the backup?

Hi Joe. I found that the lsblk program on my linux mint machine has no -S option. But i have commented out the tests that uses it; # if [[ ! $(lsblk -S -o TRAN | grep 'usb') = *usb* ]]; then So it works for me now. Thanks

where is the partition tool "disks" located you used to partition the drive?

Hi Joe I followed this tutorial to the end I did everything you did. I tried bu again and got (bu: command not found. the bashrc file has this at bottom this in it. (fi # set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" fi

would really help me if you could make your mouse pointer larger and not wiggle it around willy-nilly when you are trying to show something on the computer.

My cup runneth over. I used a 64GB thumb drive and got to about 86%. I really don't use my Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop all that much, but, I have been experimenting with virtual machines, and I think I have 9. So, I suppose that probably is the reason. I'll either try removing my virtual machines, or get a larger thumb drive.

I am using MX Linux and I created the bin folder in my Home directory and it did not work the way you described I did log off and back on I even rebooted.

There is a spelling error on line 127 it says "hostneme" should be "hostname" ;)

Do you need free space on the source equivalent to /etc and /home? My source drive fills up before the backup is finished.

im a noob why is the ETC directory important

I have tried to add this to a cronjob to update each night and it never does, could you explain how to do this?

Here is a real problem: I installed GRSYNC a few years ago and I backed my files to an external hard drive. Today with Linux mint 19.2, I find GRSYNC is not installed and BU can't open them. It's a hassle for a housewife that needs to get at the old backup files. Linux is not friendly!

FIRST!

Thank you but I'll stick with xbt

So wait a sec... you just stated you worked with Windows before having dedicated to Linux yes? If so, I have a serious problem you may can assist me in. First, a little context: So, I have a laptops bios locked, which is accessible but Bios admin is not. I have since learned how to get me to an options menu that is by way of starting the laptop and at the moment the windows flag starts to display quickly shutting down using pwr button. Then starting it again I can get to the aforementioned area. [It comes full circle and not so confusing any more right here, I promise....] So in Linux, which I'm accustomed to its etc/pam.conf or the likes thereof but what is it in Windows that will hold my password for login, NOT BIOS LOGIN... REGULAR, home page login. The initial problem was I forgot my login creds, the bios creds and the admin bios creds to assist in changing my password to a more memorable one but now I just wanna erase it all and start over. No passwd key, no DVD either. Am I helpable?? Any help would be appreciated. Thx

"Luckybackup" is no longer supported, nor developed. It is rsync based, available on all (?) Linux operating systems. Could you take over? It would look good on your employment & studies CV. I use LuckyBackup, but I don't know if it's the best. All my USB drives are formatted in MS NTFS-COMPRESSED formats. All my Linux operating systems have no trouble reading-writing from these drives. BTW: I hate CLI, bash and that stuff. Good GUI design allows me to focus on other parts of my life & work. To me any "operating system" should be invisible, stay out of my way, and not bother me. Much like the plumbing of anywhere I live or work. Thank you for explaining the code for us. Although I do not want to learn code writing, at least I will have better understanding my reading of it.

there is more chance of a bad command than a strike, but now with all those planes flaying around you never know....

ack p

THANKS JOE FOR YOUR "MAGA" EFFORTS!!! wtkjr.!!!

hi Joe love your videos and thx for solving my previous issues. i have recently got a ryzen build i got a ryzen 5 2400g with a gigabyte b450m d3sh mobo. however i am facing a lot of issues with Debian based OS of Linux like mx , mint and Ubuntu issues like my Bluetooth dongle doesn't work or the whole computer freezes when WiFi adapter is tried to connect i cannot even get into grub menu in mint to go back to a lower kernel. however manjaro works fine, but i really like mint and am at my wits end trying to make it work on this hardware without issues. please help if you can thank you and keep up the great work