You may have tried many ‘restore applications’, but this edition of techblog is gonna introduce an application that virtually allows you to travel back in time! Well, the name of the application itself is ‘Back in Time’. This is not a simple ‘restore application’. Using this application, you can actually ‘go back’ to the previous states of directories and files without restoring the whole system.

Many popular distributions have added this to their repository. So you can use any standard install command for installing it. If you are in  Debian you can issue:

apt get install backintime-gnome

This will install the Gnome version of the application. You may also note that there is a KDE 4 version as well. If you fail to install it using this method, try downloading it from the official website.

The project has many features similar to those of the flyback and TimeVault projects

Going Back in Time

Once you have installed the application, you can find the same in the ‘System Tools’ menu (This may change depending on the distribution that you are using). And ,as you can see, there are two options – you can run this as a normal user or as root user.

Well, in most cases you won’t need the root user privileges unless you need to backup some system files.

Once the application starts, you can click on the left most icon to add a new ‘snapshot’ (an instance of your system  or directory). This will also allow you to setup a timer, if you wish to backup your files or directories on a regular basis.

You can select ‘the place’ (directory) you need to save the ‘snapshots’ and the time interval. The important point you need to note here is that the directory (folder) you are going to choose here shouldn’t be a sub-directory (sub folder) of the folder you want to backup.

Let’s say if you want to backup your Documents directory, then you can choose the directory to which the snapshot to be saved as ‘/home/aasisvinayak/backup_directory/’.

The application also allows you to remove the ‘old backup copies’ of the directory and hence you can save the space in your system. You can go to the ‘auto-remove’ tab for configuring these options.

Also note that just like you run ‘cron jobs’ in a server (for doing a task on a routine basis), you can setup tasks in a similar way.

Once you have done that, you can see the snapshots in the sidebar of the application. Here you can see that I’m taking the snapshots of my music folder.

If you want to take a new snapshot at a particular time (say, during the time interval between two automatic snapshots), you can click on the ‘Take snapshot’ icon in the application. This will create a new snapshot of the current state of the directory.

And you can view them by going to the folder listings in the application. And if you want to restore a particular snapshot which you took long back, right click on the directory and select the ‘Restore Option’.

This will restore the directory to its original form. If you have this application, then there is no need to worry about restoration of critical files in case if they are accidently deleted.