Help creating incremental backups using --backup-dir.

[henri]

Have you considered pulling the backup via SSH rather than pushing it  
to the server over SMB? If pulling the backup is a possibility, I  
would recommend this configuration.

As an example if you run LBackup (rsync backend) on the server and  
pull the backup then hard-links will work great. The following link  
contains documentation regarding pulling and pushing backups with  
LBackup : http://connect.homeunix.com/lbackup/network_backup

The way LBackup handles push backups is via disk images (virtual file  
systems). This means that before the backup starts the virtual  
filesystem must be mounted and then when the backup has completed you  
may want to unmount the virtual file system. LBackup includes example  
pre and post scripts to do deal with the image mounting and un- 
mounting on Mac OS X by calling hdiutil. I have a similar setup in use  
at the moment which uses SSH Fuse to host the disk image file.  
However, this particular backup is started manually and is closely  
monitored.

Keep in mind that LBackup is designed to pull the backup to the backup  
server.

If you have to push the backups and you are looking for reliability,  
then LSync could be another option. Designed to work with pull or push  
backups and provide fail over support for servers, LSync may be a  
better fit if you must perform a push backup. Incremental support with  
LSync is provided via Link-Backup. Lsync details are available from  
the following URL : http://www.lucidsystems.org/tools/lsync

When using rsync to perform incremental backups with with hard links  
enabled, I have found that pulling backups is very robust. In  
addition, LBackup and LSync (expert system under construction) will  
also provide you with various options with regards backup reports.

Hopefully this information is helpful.


On 10/04/2009, at 6:11 AM, David Miller wrote:

> Normally I would use the --link-dest option to do this but I can't
> since I'm rsyncing from a Mac to a Samba share on a Linux box and hard
> links don't work. What I want to do is create a 10 day rotating
> incremental backup. I used the first script example on the rsync
> examples page as a template. The only thing I changed was the
> destination to be a local directory and paths for the other variables.
> when I run the script nothing gets copied into the directories named
> by the day of the week. Each day when the script runs the directory
> with the name of the current week day is created but everything just
> goes into current. and stays there. Can someone post an example that
> does work for what I'm trying to do? Below is the script I'm using.
>
>
> #-------------------
> # directory to backup
> BDIR=$HOME/Documents
>
> BACKUPDIR=`date +%A`
> OPTS=" -aX --force --progress --ignore-errors --delete --backup --
> backup-dir=/$BACKUPDIR"
>
> # the following line clears the last weeks incremental directory
> [ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir
> /usr/local/bin/rsync3.0.5 --delete -a $HOME/emptydir/ /Volumes/SAMBA/
> $BACKUPDIR/
> rmdir $HOME/emptydir
>
> # now the actual transfer
> /usr/local/bin/rsync3.0.5 $OPTS $BDIR /Users/Shared/current
> #-------------------
>
> Thanks.
> David.
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