Adjust your backup settings
Michael Terry

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Unported License

# Creating Backups

# First Backup

The first time you open Déjà Dup, you will need to set up your first backup.

Click on the Create Your First Backup… button.

A dialog will appear asking for some important initial settings. See below for more information on them.

Click Back Up.

You will likely be prompted to set an encryption password for the backup.

Wait for your first backup to finish. It may take some time!

# Schedule

By default, you must click Back Up Now to make further backups. But it’s strongly recommended that you enable automatic backups.

To edit the automatic backup schedule, click the Schedule option from the main window.

## Back Up Automatically

Turn this option on to have Déjà Dup automatically back up for you. This is recommended so that you don’t forget to do it yourself. Backups are more useful the more recent they are, so it is important to back up regularly.

## Automatic Backup Frequency

Choose how frequently you want your automatic backups to be scheduled. Exact timing of the day is not customizable, but backups will be occur in the middle of the night if possible. Additionally, automatic backups are paused and/or not scheduled when in Power Saver or Game Mode.

## Keep Backups

Choose the minimum amount of time to keep backup files. If you find that the backup files are taking up too much space, you may want to decrease this duration. Due to implementation details, files may be kept a bit longer than the chosen time. But no files will be deleted early.

Backups are kept forever by default, but still may be deleted earlier if the storage location begins to run out of space.

# Folders

By default, your entire home folder (minus the Trash and Downloads folders) are included in backups.

To edit the list of included folders, click the Folders option from the main window.

## Folders to Back Up

Choose a list of folders to save in your backup. Press the Add Backed Up Folder… or Remove buttons to modify the list.

## Folders to Ignore

Choose a list of folders to not save in your backup. Press the Add Ignored Folder… or Remove buttons to modify the list.

Some of your data may be large and not very important to you. In that case, you can save yourself some time and space by not backing them up.

Some locations are always ignored by default:

~/.cache

~/.ccache

~/.gvfs

~/.Private

~/.steam/root (which by default also ignores ~/.local/share/Steam)

~/.var/app/*/cache

~/.var/app/*/config/Cache

~/.var/app/*/config/Code Cache

~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.steam/root

~/.xsession-errors

~/snap/*/*/.cache

/dev

/proc

/run

/sys

/tmp

Any folder with a CACHEDIR.TAG or .deja-dup-ignore file in it.

# Storage Location

The storage location is where Déjà Dup will put its copies of your files so that they can be restored later.

To change where backups are kept, click the Storage Location option from the main window.

Note that backups can be quite large, so make sure you have enough free disk space.

If you'd like to use an external drive as a storage location, plug it in and it will show up in the list.

While you can choose a local folder for your backups, this is not recommended. If your hardware fails, you will lose both your original data and your backups all at once.