// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
6 Backup Tools for Linux Users of All Kind
There's no shortage of free backup tools on Linux. The problem is choosing which one to use.
The choice of backup tool depends on what you're actually doing. Someone backing up a home folder on a GNOME desktop has nothing in common (backup tool wise) with someone running five servers and a NAS.
In other words, different types of Linux users would have different need of a backup software.
Let me share you a variety of backup tools you can use in a variety of situations in Linux.
Desktop Linux users running GNOME will get the smoothest experience from Déjà Dup. It's already in most GNOME-based distros and asks almost nothing of you. Connect it to Google or One drive or some network server for offsite backups.
Individual professionals and small teams need commercial-use licensing as much as features. Kopia is the strongest fit here. Open source, no restriction on business use. MSP360 Free covers the cloud-backup workflow well but is licensed for personal use only, so it's a better match for a side project than client data.
Sysadmins and homelabbers managing more than one servers should look at BorgBackup, Restic, or UrBackup. The choice really comes down to whether you want a CLI tool on each machine or one server watching all of them.
Take Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, basically any GNOME-based distro, odds are Déjà Dup is sitting in your app menu. Just search for "Backups." in the GNOME Activity. Pick what to back up, pick where it goes, set a schedule. That's the whole process.
It moved to a Restic backend a while back, so under the hood you're getting all the goodness of Restic, proper incremental snapshots, not just a folder copy. And all this without ever opening a terminal, Restic is CLI after all.
You can choose to store the backup in Google Drive, OneDrive, local folder (but what's the point), network server (NAS) or use RClone to any cloud storage of your choice.