Info Linux and Microcontroller

Storage is becoming more cheaper everyday. Buying an external hard drive to make backups is not much costlier. Doing backups should be easy enough to be done on a regular basis. The more automated, the better.

Here we can discuss a tool easy-to-use but powerful for regular backup. rdiff-backup is a python script that helps doing local and remote incremental backups. To backup your Home directory to an external hard drive mounted in /media/backup simply do:

$ rdiff-backup $HOME /media/backup/home_backup

If after some days you want to backup your new files, run the same command to update the backup.

Now, in /media/backup/home_backup you have an exact copy of your home as it was when you did the last backup. If you want to restore a directory, you can just copy it:

$ cp -a /media/backup/home_backup/src/myprogram ~/src/

Which is equivalent to:

$ rdiff-backup --restore-as-of now /media/backup/home_backup/src/myprogram ~/src/

Of course, you can restore previous versions of the file. For example, to restore the source of myprogram as it was a mounth ago:

$ rdiff-backup --restore-as-of 1M /media/backup/home_backup/src/myprogram ~/src/

You can see all the incremental backups you have done executing:

$ rdiff-backup --list-increments /media/backup/home_backup

If you run out of space in your backup device and you’re sure you don’t need the backups you made three years ago, you can remove them with:

$ rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 3Y /media/backup/home_backup

rdiff-backup works exactly the same with remote directories. You need to have ssh access and rdiff-backup must be installed in the remote(s) machine(s). Note that in any example above, you can change the local directories to remote ones, so you can backup a remote machine locally, or do a backup of this machine to a remote backup-server. For example, say backup.mysite.org is your backup server. You can backup regularly using:

$ rdiff-backup local-dir/ user@backup.mysite.org::/remote-dir

If you use RSA or DSA authentication, you can even put that in a cron job.

See rdiff-backup documentation and other examples to discover all the functionality of this package.

Similar packages

Frontends for rdiff-backup:

• keep is a GUI (KDE) frontend for rdiff-backup.
• archfs is a fuse (filesystem in userspace) virtual filesystem that lets you browse each version of a rdiff-backup repository as if they were any other directory. Adam Sloboda has stated his intention to package archfs for Debian.
• rdiff-backup-web (not in Debian, no WNPP yet) is a web frontend for rdiff-backup.