Open Source Tools for Remote Incremental Backups on Linux: An Experimental Evaluation

Computer data has become one of the most valuable assets that individuals, organizations and enterprises own today. The majority of people agree that losing their data (programs, data sets, documentation files, email addresses, photos, customer data, etc.) would be a disaster. The reason most individuals avoid performing data backups though, is because they feel the process is complicated, tedious and expensive. This is not always true. In fact, with the right tool, it’s very easy and affordable. In this paper we compare the performance and system resources usage of five remote incremental backup open source tools for Linux: Rsync, Rdiff-backup, Duplicity, Areca and Link-Backup. These tools are tested using three distinct remote backup operations: full backup, incremental backup and data restoration. The advantages of each tool are described and we select the most efficient backup tool for simple replication operations and the overall best backup tool.