Rysnc Schedule

[Matt McCutchen]

On 7/18/07, sparty2809 <sparty2809 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What I want to do is use rsync to back up a folder to an external drive.
>
> I would like to keep 30 days worth.
>
> For example: I have backups of June 1 - June 30. Once July 1 comes along, I
> want to keep June 2 - July 1 and delete June 1, and so forth.
>
> Any ideas how I can accomplish this?

You can do this very easily with rsnapshot ( http://www.rsnapshot.org/
), a backup program built around rsync.  It manages a rotating set of
snapshots that all appear to be full, but unchanged files are
hard-linked from one snapshot to the next to save storage.  You would
configure it with a single backup point and a single interval,
"daily", with 30 snapshots.

If space on the external disk is an issue, you could use rdiff-backup
( http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ ) instead.  It represents old
versions of a file using a chain of backward deltas instead of full
copies.

Matt