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. -- Chris Green ยท
