On 17/12/15 23:06, Erik Christiansen via luv-main wrote:

On 17.12.15 21:33, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:

...

There are a variety of backup systems that start with rsync and manage trees of links. It's not difficult to write your own, rsync the files, run "cp -al" to make a copy with hard links and use today's date in the directory name, and then delete backup directories that are too old.

I'm not grokking the benefit of doing the rsync _and_ a "cp -al". I just include -aH in my rsync options, the -H to preserve hard links. Seems to work.

At my workplace, we use this rsync option: --link-dest=DIR hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged where DIR would be the most recent successful backup directory. I wrote aboute 500 lines of Bash for my workplace years ago which is basically an rsync wrapper that also reads hosts and directories to backup from a config file, and does some basic directory management to make it easy to browse backups and see what you are restoring. Today after reading this thread, I asked and was granted permission to make the git repo public. It's a bit hackish, but it has served us well and might be worth a look. https://github.com/sitepoint/abs Since it backs up hosts on the network using rsync over SSH via pubkey authentication, we use the rrsync wrapper script (typically installed at /usr/share/doc/rsync/scripts/rrsync.gz in the rsync package), with authorized_keys files like: command="/usr/local/sbin/rrsync -ro /" ssh-rsa <key> <host comment> and PermitRootLogin forced-commands-only in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config option on targeted hosts to improve security. Cheers, Adam