Time rsYnc Machine (tym)

[Voelker, Bernhard]

M. Carrasco wrote (Friday, August 10, 2012 12:23 AM):

> Reading the rsync man page, it seems that the -H option with
> --link-dest is tricky. The price to pay on not using -H is that
> hard linked files are treated as separated files: I could not
> find any mechanism in rsync to improve the time machine effect;
> I would appreciate hits on how to improve it. I highlight this
> in the tym man page and inside the program.

I'm still using the way before -H and --link-dest were available:

  cp --archive --link "$PREVIOUS_SNAPSHOT" "$NEW_SNAPSHOT"

  rsync                                 \
    --archive --verbose --delete        \
    --delete-excluded --one-file-system \
    $SOME_EXCLUDE_INCLUDE_RULES         \
    "$DIR_TO_BACKUP/" "$NEW_SNAPSHOT"

With a bit shuffling around the snapshot directories, I keep
24x hourly, 7x daily, 4x weekly and 12 montly snapshots (using
4 cron jobs).

Furthermore, I've mounted the backup partition as /root/backup,
with a read-only bind-mount on /media/backup so that the user
can always have a safe look into all the snapshots.
;-)

Have a nice day,
Berny