[Cialug] Backups with rsync

[D. Joe Anderson]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 10:06:39AM -0600, Jonathan Bailey wrote:
> Academician Kula wrote:
> 
> >I am curious why you don't want hard links --- I've been using rsync
> >with hard links to do backups for a while now and it seems to work
> >well for me. Knowing a bit more about your situation may give us ideas
> >for you to try.    
>
> I want to do incremental backups since they take less disk space in the 
> end (full backups every Sunday for example). I'd then like to rsync 
> those backups to another server. This is what I'm using for incremental 
> backups now - it's not perfect, but I'm lookign for better.
> 
> rsync -av --exclude-from=/root/rs.exclude 
> --compare-dest=/backup/backup-$WEK/ /home/ 
> /backup/backup-$WEK-$DATESTAMP/ > /backup/backup-$WEK-$DATESTAMP.log

See, that's the amazing thing about appropriate quoting--it makes it
SO much easier to see that one didn't answer a question asked.
;-)

For instance, we still haven't any idea what your issue is with
hard links in your backup set.  

As for Dave's point about restoring from incrementals--that
seems like a reasonable concern for incrementals spread across
separate pieces of removable media or whatever.  But one of the
major points of using the hardlinks method from the Mike
Rubel-style[1] rsync backups is that each backup appears to be a
*full* backup so far as the filesystem cares.  

Granted, you don't have the redundancy that having real multiple
full backups would give you, but you do get the incrementality
(is that even a word?) and you don't end up taking the amount of
storage or time that multiple full backups would take.

-- 
Joe

[1] http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/