How to Install Backintime Backup Software on CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 7

Introduction

Hopefully the title of this post is explanation enough.

Backintime is a neat backup solution that mimics in some ways, the abilities of OSX’ Timemachine backup system.  At predetermined time intervals, Backintime will sweep configured directories on your computer, and only backup the differences since the last sweep.  It results in an efficient use of storage resources on your backup destination drive by hard linking identical files.  Unlike the OSX Timemachine solution, it does not hard link directories, as only Apple’s HFS+ filesystem supports hard-linked directories.  This makes Backintime portable to Unix-based Operating Systems using a variety of filesystems.

The reason for this post is to document some trickery necessary to make Backintime work on our favourite North American Linux vendor’s enterprise operating system, the derivative on which that I use being CentOS 7.  CentOS 7 like its other cousins in the Red Hat family only includes Python interpreter version 2.  While Backintime is written in Python 3.  I have had only a little experience with Python, and it does have some great features (built in multi-threading), however making the two versions incompatible is such a nuisance.  Whinge over, the trick to allowing Backintime to work on CentOS 7 is to install a 3rd party Python 3 interpreter.  The following instructions achieve this end.

Instructions

Download Backintime from their website, and follow the installation instructions from the README file.

Next, you will need to install a 3rd-party YUM Repository called softwarecollections.org

yum localinstall https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/python33/epel-7-x86_64/download/rhscl-python33-epel-7-x86_64.noarch.rpm
yum install python33

Then create a script file to execute the python3 interpreter with the command python3 by creating the following shell script as the file /usr/local/bin/python3

#!/bin/sh
scl enable python33 -- python $@

Then compile and install Backintime from the downloaded

./configure --python3 && make && make install