Incremental backups

[H.S.]

Maxime Alarie wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> I use Karmic 9.1 server, no UI!    
> 
> I have a server with about 40GB of important documents  on it.  I have
> setup a cronjob to backup a  filesystem  every night.. But now I would
> like to implement incremental backups every day. Because its starting to
> take too much space..
> 
>  
> 
> The way I do it at the moment is  that I tar.gz the file system  and
> then I rsync to  sdb1. Once a week I rsync sdb1 with an external
> disk...
> 
>  
> 
> I wondering if any of you know a good way to  setup incremental backups
> using nothing but the shell, since I have no UI on that server..
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.

I have used the procedure described here to create a shell script (also
did this in perl and also in python) to create the scrips:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

They are fairly easy to create once you read the link above. One of my
scripts does hourly backups and the other does daily backups. The most
important thing to consider is the directories or paths that you don't
to backup. For example, I exclude all .[Tt]rash*, .[Cc]ache*, tmp/, etc.
files and folders.

I put these rolling snapshots and back ups on a different drive on my
computer (could be on the network as well). That drive is mounted a
read-only normally, but the scrips first remount it to read/write mode,
do their stuff, and reset it back to read-only mode, thus preventing any
accidental deletions.

The advantage of using rsync and the way it handles hard links is that
numerous backups of the same data do not use negligible extra space.
Basically, only the changes take up the extra space. It is quite nifty
actually!




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