From version 0.3, rsyncbackup support incremental backup both to local and remote destinations. Incremental backup means that the changes from last backup is saved separate from the previous backup, such that you can restore several versions of your backup. In example you can have full backups from both Monday, Tuesday, Wedenesday, Thursday... and so on. If you find you want the tuesday version of your report, you'll find it. First you will think; wouldn't this require very much disk usage. Well, no, if you just store the files that are changed. With rsyncbackup you can specify a destination to be incremental, and you can specify how many increments you want. Several versions of your backup will then be available. The use of hardlinks allow you to get several separate without storing the same file twice. To have 6 additional increments, in example for you daily
backup set, so you have one week of backups, you can create the following destination:
ipod-incr|local[tag=backupincr,incremental=6]:/Volumes/iPodAndreas/Backup/|\ test -d /Volumes/iPodAndreas/Backup/|--whole-file --delete media-backup-incr|ssh[incremental=4,key=insecure-ibook,tag=increment]:andrs@192.168.1.22:\ /Volumes/Backup/rsync/Snow-incr|traceroute -m 2 192.168.1.22|--delete
The second line is an example of remote incremental backup. The incremental option specify how many additional increments you want, incremental=0
is default and disable incremental backup. tag=foo
is used for naming the destinations folders foo.0
(newest), foo.1
, foo.2
, foo.3
and so on. You probably want to use incremental backup together with the --delete
rsync option, which allows files that are deleted on your source also to be deleted at the destination, because the deleted file will still we available through some older increments.
When using incremental backups, you can only backup from one source to that specific incremental destinations.