For reference, for as long as I can remember I have used Deja Dup backup tool on Ubuntu. I have had to fall back on it several times over the years and it has been an absolute lifesaver. It’s one of those tools I am happy to shout from the rooftops about as for an end user like myself, it gets the job done without any obvious fuss.

With my recent move to KDE Neon I am trying to focus of the KDE application catalogue (katalogue?) to get the most out of using KDE as these applications should always be the latest and greatest. To this end I installed the KDE Kup backup application as my fall back. You can find Kup via discover on KDE or via the Kup application page here. Setting it up is straight forward enough, you just tick boxes with your preferences, get to the end, hit ‘apply’ and a notification pops up asking you to save your first backup. Super!

On my laptop with a much smaller amount of data (usually around 10GB), the ‘versioned’ backup option with the integrity checking, and recovery options checked was all done within and hour on the first run onto an external USB drive. Happy days. So then I went to do the same on my PC with it’s 400GB worth of data. Choose the same options, and let it run.

And run.

And run.

And run.

After 24 hours my first backup was still not complete. A first run with Deja Dup (which it did each month to avoid corruption) was normally a 8 hour process. Then subsequent interval backups in the region of 45mins. So I ended the first run of Kup, and unchecked the creating of recovery information.

18 hours later, still running. So I ended that.

Then I ran the first backup again with none of the advanced options checked, and 8 hours later I had my first versioned backup complete. I tried now selecting the integrity check option and ran again thinking the hard work was done, but 12 hours later it was still verifying the integrity of the first backup without having started the next interval backup.

I did not have ‘peace of mind’. The unchecked integrity check and recovery options just left me worried that I might have a corrupted interval backup somewhere and then when I really do need the backup, the whole thing is useless. That’s what played on my mind, and I was not willing to take a chance on the data I had saved, so I have created a different backup profile, this time with the ‘synchronised’ Kup backup option. This is basically an exact image of my HDD as it stands at whenever the last backup was taken, no other versions of any files.

The first run took about 5 hours for the 400GB, and the next time it ran after that it was all done in about 40 mins. I can see everything saved in my backup drive and it all looks fine. My laptop still uses the versioned backup, but I do not really understand why I can not get it to run properly on my PC. But it’s not something I am going to risk taking a gamble on either.

Overall, Kup integrates perfectly into the KDE environment. It is straight-forward to use, my only suggestion is that the’ show hidden folders’ tick-box nested under the ‘advanced’ tab is moved up to the ‘sources’ section as it removes the doubt at that stage that your hidden directories are being backed up. Especially if you are of the mindset to avoid ‘advanced’ settings.

So I got there in the end, and now it’s working just fine. You are always one bad update away from needing to rely on a backup, never mind anything else life might throw at us, so a solid backup solution is definitely one of the first things to get nailed down on any device.