Free online backup with Virgin Media and Linux

My ISP Virgin Media offers online backup packages as part of their internet bundles.

The bundle that I am currently on offers 10GB of online backup space FREE as part of the account. Well, obviously its not really free as I’m paying for the internet connection.

The partner that Virgin Media use to offer this online backup service is provided by a company called steek who are based in Belgium. The software that they provide is Windows only, but you can make it work with Wine to a satisfactory degree.

Here is how I set mine up:

1) Download the Software from Virgin Media My Stuff Page: https://my.virginmedia.com/dashboard/start

2) Using winecfg I setup a Z: drive which points to my root /

3) In the Virgin Media V STuff Backup Software I turned off all the auto backup email items as they just look for Hotmail and My Documents etc and I choose “Backup All Files/Folders”

4) Now simply choose the files you want from this screen:

I am backing up my .evolution, Documents, and Pictures. That way at least I have these backed up. The software works ok, although it doesn’t seem very good at only uploading the changes, if the file changes it seems to need to upload the whole file again.

There are many more options in the software that can be configured but what I have setup is enough to get you going with it.

You may want to setup this software to autostart with your PC, to do this I added a script:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 480
env WINEPREFIX=”/home/lee/.wine” wine “C:\Program Files\VirginMedia\V Stuff Backup\v_stuff_backup.exe”
exit

to my scripts directory and then I setup Sessions in Gnome (System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Sessions) of this:/home/lee/Scripts/startvbackup.sh

This starts it 8 minutes after login enough time to warrant a connection from it :)