Backing up data with mintBackup

Process of Elimination

Once you're satisfied with all the settings, click Forward . In the next dialog, you can exclude specific subdirectories or files from being copied (Figure 3). Here's where you would eliminate those pesky symlinks from the process. Just select the desired file or directory and click the appropriate button.

Figure 3: All selected directories and files in the list are excluded from the backup. To remove an entry from the list, mark it and click Remove.

The directory itself is still backed up in the destination, but it will be empty. If you're creating an archive, the excluded directories will be ignored completely. Once you've selected what to exclude, click Forward to get a confirmation dialog. If everything is okay, click Apply to start backing up.

In the Destination directory, you'll find the hidden .mintbackup file along with all the copied files. Apart from the backup description, the file also contains the source directory name and the number of copied files. This file comes into play later during a restore, so you should not delete or modify it. If you create an archive, the filename includes the creation date, the time, and the word backup . The hidden file .mintbackup will be in the archive.

Restoring

To restore a backup, you can click the Restore files button shown in Figure 1. For an archive, click the Archive option and select (None) as the Source . In the next dialog, select the restore directory as the Destination (Figure 4).

Figure 4: For these settings, mintBackup will restore the B250199F50196AFC directory to clem.

Because mintBackup has to open and inspect an archive, restoring an archive can take quite a long time. At times, it can seem like mintBackup has crashed, but it hasn't.

If the backup is in a directory, you can select the Directory option and then set the Source directory to where the backup is located and the Destination to where you want mintBackup to restore it. Regardless of whether you are restoring from an Archive or a Directory , if files already exist in the destination directory, mintBackup will overwrite them. Set the Advanced options | Overwrite drop-down to suit your needs.

Clicking Forward shows a confirmation dialog (Figure 5). Currently (at least in version 2.0.7), you'll run into a nasty program error: mintBackup ignores the previously configured Source and Destination settings and imposes restoring to the /root directory. Clicking Apply at this point would restore everything there. If this is not what you want, the only solution is to stop mintBackup and copy over the files manually or unpack the archive.