possibly new rsync trick: rotating snapshots

[Mike Rubel]

Hello all,

I've found a simple, rsync-based trick to emulate the "rotating snapshots"
feature found on some file servers, and hope that members of this group
will find it useful and/or interesting:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Snapshots are (or rather, appear to be) full backups of a system taken at
regular intervals, available directly to users through a special read-only
system directory.  When users accidentally delete or overwrite important
files, or find themselves in need of an old version, they can copy from
the snapshots without any sysadmin help.

Since I first saw the labor savings that automatic, rotating snapshots
provide (relative to restore from incremental tape backups), I've been
searching for a way to mimic them on my home Linux machine.  Rsync gave me
a way to deal with the difficult part--making what are really incremental
backups appear to be full ones.

Thanks in advance for any feedback or suggestions--
Mike