CloudBerry An Easy To Use Cloud Backup Tool For Linux

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​All of us store our important files on our computer. These important files may include family photos, personal files, and business/office files. What if you miss these files? A hard disk failure could cause all your files go away or what if you delete them mistakenly. So it’s always best to backup all your files somewhere. In this article, I’m going to inform you about a software that does it easily, CloudBerry Backup.  

What is CloudBerry?

​CloudBerry Backup is a cross-platform cloud backup solution. With CloudBerry, you can backup your important data to public cloud services such as Google cloud, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure etc. or you can also create backup locally.For Linux systems, there is a very easy to use GUI tool available. You can simply download CloudBerry Backup for your Debian based Linux or rpm based Linux distros.

Download

How to install CloudBerry Backup in Ubuntu Linux?

​I’m using a Ubuntu based Linux distro. If you’re using Fedora based Linux, simply use your distribution package manager to install the file.  

Install in Linux Lite

Open the file in gdebi or use terminal to install.

To install from terminal, use dpkg command – 

sudo dpkg -i <strong>path/cloudberry_file.deb</strong>

The installation will take a few seconds.

Open CloudBerry Backup from application menu.

Now select your plan. If you’re using it for personal purpose, select home edition plan. It’s free. Or you can activate 15 day trial of pro and ultimate plan. And last, of all, you can activate a commercial version by providing a license key.

For home edition you don’t need to provide any license key at all. Simply select it and click next. You need to subscribe their premium plan.  

CloudBerry Backup plans

They have one time subscription plans. You pay once and use the software. The company also provides yearly maintenance plan but that’s completely optional. Here are the plans below –

After selecting plan, you’re ready to setup your cloud storage account with CloudBerry and create a backup plan. Let me mention one thing. When I say cloud backup, I don’t mean Dropbox, Box, Google Cloud or OneDrive. CloudBerry supports the commercial cloud providers such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. Here is a complete list that the software supports.

Setup Cloud storage account & create backup plan

First of all login to your any of the above cloud service provider account. Now from the CloudBerry, click the plus (+) sign to start the setup.

Now select your cloud storage. Remember that these are separate services, you’ll require to purchase cloud services.

For the purpose of this article, I’m using Backblaze B2 cloud service. It comes with a free account and does not make Credit card necessary while creating account. Simply log into your account and you’ll get all the credentials there. You need Account ID, Application Key and the app will sync all your buckets automatically. Select the bucket where you want to store your backup files.

And that’s it. Now select the cloud storage. The further setup is very easy.

Now name your backup plan. You can create multiple backups and naming backup will make easier to manage them.

Next select the directories or files you want to backup to cloud storage.

Filter directories or files want to backup

The next filter the files you want to backup. This feature is useful when you only want to backup files with specific extensions. For example, you can type .png or .jpeg or .exe.Or you can also do the opposite. You can filter out the specific file types by entering in the second box.

Compress and encrypt files

Now this is a paid feature. To improve security, you can enable encryption and lock it with a strong password. You can also enable compression. It’ll compress your files before it uploads them to server.

Manage files versions

Retention policy. You can set the app to delete old files or versions of files. For example, when you take regular backup, you can set the app to delete your versions older than x number of days. Or you can also set the app to delete the files that have been deleted locally.

By default, the app will delete the file versions older than 3 days.

Schedule backup plans

Scheduling backup plan is very useful. Simply schedule your backup and forget it. The particular backup plan will run automatically at your scheduled time.

Receive backup notifications

Finally enable backup notifications. It might happen that your backup plan fails due to some issues, so this will notify you that a particular backup plan has failed. But you’ll not want feature just for failure, you can also enable notification for all types of statuses. Even the plan has run successfully, it’ll notify you. So simply enter your email id and select when you want to be notified.

And that’s all. Lastly, review your backup plan in the summary. You can edit your backup anytime, change the notification settings, update files you want to backup or simply delete the backup at all and create new ones.

How to restore backups?

Restoring your backup is a similar process. The way we created the backup plan, similarly, we’ll need to create restore plans. You’ll need to select files you want to restore and other variables. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble in creating restore plans. If you’ve any trouble, let me know in the comment section below. I’ll help you out.  

Pros

Now here are the few things that I like and dislike about this app. I hope that the company will consider these points and implement or remove them from the app.

  • CloudBerry Backup is really easy to install on Linux, easy to setup cloud account
  • Easy to create backup and restore plan
  • Fast and no bugs while testing it on Linux system
  • Feature rich

Cons

  • The app is not open source (so sad for foss lovers)
  • Only email support and response time is 48 hours (what if I die in that period!)
  • Does not support cloud services such as Google Drive, and OneDrive. We don’t have official Linux apps for these services so it’ll be great if the app supports these popular cloud services.

Conclusion

So this was the CloudBerry app for cloud backup. Linux users should find this app easy to use, no CLI type of things are there. You have a simple and easy to follow setup + so many features. If you’re a home user, then it could be a little hard for you to setup cloud account because most cloud services ask for Credit card that most home users FOSS lovers don’t want to share. But on the other hand, the app is great for companies having large amount of data. It can backup it easily and safely.

So thanks for reading and do share your opinion about this app in the comment section below this article.