On 3/14/25 05:40, Chris Green wrote:
tim wade <di...@openmbox.net> wrote:
Hello
I plan to make increment backup for my home dir.
It's currently in the size of 1xx GB.
besides rsync, do you know any other software/service for increment
backup?
Most of the replies so far seem to have ignored 'increment[al]'. While
complete backups are sometimes useful I find incremental ones much
better most of the time and they allow one to keep really old backups
without running out of space.
There are a couple of programs that use rsync to do incremental
backups, the rsync resources page (https://rsync.samba.org/resources.html)
provides some possibilities.
I used to use rsyncbackup which worked OK but I decided I wanted more
ways to configure things so I wrote my own system which is simply a
bash script that uses rsync to do the actual file copying and making
hard links.
I have hourly backups of /home which are kept until they're five weeks
old, these often save me from myself when I delete or change files by
mistake or whatever. These are kept on the same machine but on a
separate drive.
Then I have long term backups which are made daily to a remote
machine, every day's backup is kept for a month and then they are
selectively thinned out so I have monthly backups for the past year
and then yearly back ups 'for ever'. They go back around twwnty years
or more!
I did actually dig around one of the very old backups (well over ten
years old) for some photos my daughter had lost - and I found them!
One of the big advantages of using rsync's hard-link for doing this is
that the backups all look like a complete /home directory and you can
dig around in them without any effort at all, no unpacking, no
decoding, nothing, it's all just the files as you know them.
I do use .rsync-filter to filter out things that either don't need
backup or that change so frequently that they make backups pointless,
things like .bash_history and .xsession-errors for example.
That sounds most interesting Chris. Something that can work as you work
w/o interfering with your work.
Can you write up some docs, pkg and publish it?
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
