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I would like to make a backup of all the data in my Fedora Laptop (Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, etc.) in an external hard drive. Basically I need to know two things:

  1. A good software to do this which works in Fedora (since I am a very basic user, I would require it to be very user friendly).

  2. What kind of external hard drive do I have to buy? I ask this because I researched a few brands (Toshiba, Sony and Verbatim) and they say their product is compatible with Windows and Mac, but there's no mention about Linux. I was thinking maybe I could just buy any of these brand's external hard drive and then format it to ext4 (the format my Laptop is formatted to), but I'm not sure.

Thank you in advance.

Carl Rojas
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  • @jasonwryan I see nothing there about the second point in my inquiry. – Carl Rojas Mar 06 '15 at 01:02
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    The second point is off topic here: we don't do hardware or product recommendations... – jasonwryan Mar 06 '15 at 01:12
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    @jasonwryan Ok. Close it then. – Carl Rojas Mar 06 '15 at 01:14
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    Also one question at a time is preferable. The vibe I'm getting here is, "I can't be bothered to do *any* research or reading myself because I can just ask online and someone will regurgitate this tish *again* for the umpteenth thousandth time" -- **[BOO](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem)**. WRT external USB drives they pretty much all work because USB storage protocols are standardized and do not require brand/model specific drivers. – goldilocks Mar 06 '15 at 01:47
  • @goldilocks Listen man, I don't want to bother anybody here with my question, but I'll tell you this: I have done my research, but all I found about backups is "how to make a backup from a local source to a remote server" and stuff like that, which I don't need. The only thing I have found about backing up data to an external hard drive involves lots of commands and scripts which I, a very basic user as I said, do not feel ready to use. – Carl Rojas Mar 06 '15 at 01:57
  • Okay -- to be fair this question may suffer from a "too much correspondence" problem when searching online. But common sense wise, do you really believe there isn't already oodles and oodles of stuff around about "How to back up data on linux?". It doesn't at all matter whether the drive is external or internal. My preference is `rsync`, but again, I don't see the point in the one million and one-th explanation of how to use it. Perhaps you need to find something you find vaguely viable, slow down a bit, and ask more specifically about details that you don't understand. – goldilocks Mar 06 '15 at 02:07
  • @goldilocks You are right, my question is too general in scope. Now I know every external hard drive will work, so I will play a bit with `rsync`, which seems to be (almost) everybody's tool of choice, and then I'll ask a more detailed and specific question. Thanks for the advice. – Carl Rojas Mar 06 '15 at 02:25

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If you can do a little coding (editing a config file and setting up a cron job or a logon script), you can use Simple Backup Script. It's very easy to use and will backup to disk and able to be configured to keep redundant copies with logging.

Regarding external drives, I would suggest either a Western Digital "My Book" or "My Cloud."

1) The "My Book" gives you an external USB hard drive for a very reasonable price.

2) The "My Cloud" is a self standing NAS type hard drive that sits on your network and is accessible through the network. It also includes a media server that will host audio, video, and pictures along with being able to automatically share a USB thumb drive. This will, however, take a little more effort to setup on your linux box but will give you the best long term solution. The Cloud feature does not work with linux (at least with my versions of Firefox and Chrome... haven't been able to get Iced Tea to work) but does work very well with mobile devices with the Android app.

Most manufacturers do not list linux as compatible because they do not want to provide support for them on linux. USB is common (standard) interface and is widely supported by linux today.

Carl Lindgren
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  • One question: should I format the external hard drive to `ext4` to use it with my system? – Carl Rojas Mar 06 '15 at 02:28
  • In this application, your choice of file systems doesn't really matter. ext4 is a journalized file system and you don't need the features of that file system for what you want to do with it. Having said that, ext4 would be ok and be standard. – Carl Lindgren Mar 06 '15 at 02:35
  • BTW - USB thumb drives are widely formatted with exFAT and perform very well with such a simple file system. – Carl Lindgren Mar 06 '15 at 02:40