Turn Your Chromebook into a Lightweight Backup Station

Productivity Sauce

A Chromebook excels at all things that require an Internet connection, but its usability is somewhat limited when it comes to mundane computing tasks like backup. Say, you want to use a Chromebook to back up SD cards from your camera to a USB drive when you travel. On a regular Linux machine, this task would be easy to accomplish using good old rsync. On Chromebook, however, your only option is to copy files using the Files app, which is both excruciatingly slow and impractical. A combination of Crouton and Crouton Chrome extension provides an elegant solution to the problem. Install the extension, and grab the latest version of Crouton using the https://goo.gl/fd3zc link. Press Ctrl+Alt+T, type shell, and press Enter to launch the shell. Run the sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t extension command to install the minimal version of Ubuntu that provides integration with Chrome.

Enter the chroot environment using the sudo enter-chroot command and install rsync using the sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install rsync command. That's all there is to it. You can now use rsync to perform backups between external storage devices connected to the Chromebook.