[clug] Neat Backup Solutions for desktops...

[Ben Williamson]

I use git to backup to a removable drive. It doesn't back up all file
attributes, but I don't need that. My backup script looks like this: (as the
paths suggest, this one happens to be on OSX)

#!/bin/bash
export GIT_DIR='/Volumes/BlueBrick/Backups/iPhoto-Originals.git'
export GIT_WORK_TREE='/Users/benw/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals'
cd "$GIT_WORK_TREE"
git add .
git commit -a -m "$0"

This backs up 30G of photos (20,000 files) and runs in under 10sec when not
much has changed. A little longer for many more smaller files, but still
great. Git keeps an index containing mtime for each file, so on Unix
filesystems it can just stat each file to check for changes.

- Ben.