Incremental Backups

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 08:24:54PM -0500, lists at southernohio.net wrote:
> It seems that this method would not use terribly much space in terms of 
> duplicating files, however I am not sure of the --delete portion

In your command sequence, you are (properly) moving the existing
hierarchy of files out of the way and creating a new hierarchy via
rsync, hard-linking it via --link-dest.  Thus, there is nothing to
delete (because the destination is empty), so the --delete has no effect
an can be dropped from the command.  What you _don't_ want to do is to
rsync into an already existing directory of files using --link-dest;
that can cause rsync to change the mod-time/permissions/ownership of
existing files that are hard-linked into older days, and that would make
them inaccurate for the older days.  (Though it would save space.)

Others have recommended good backup software, which you can check into.
There are some other links on the Resources page of the rsync web site.

..wayne..