Incremental backup Linux command [closed]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

This question does not appear to be about a specific programming problem, a software algorithm, or software tools primarily used by开发者_高级运维 programmers. If you believe the question would be on-topic on another Stack Exchange site, you can leave a comment to explain where the question may be able to be answered.

Closed last year.

Improve this question

What is the command to do a incremental backup? Any source or any links would be much appreciated.

---

rsync is what you are looking for. Here is a nice tutorial.

---

Depending on what you need from your backups, rdiff-backup may be what you want. It's based on the same idea as rsync, but also keeps historical backups (in a space-efficient manner, by storing the differences).

---

Dirvish makes incremental snapshots (that look as full directories trees, thanks to the magic of hardlinks), using rysnc under the hood. It works well for me.

---

Here's the command I use for incremental backups of my virtual machine using rsync.

rsync -avh --delete --progress --link-dest="/Volumes/canteloup/vm_backups/`ls -1tr /Volumes/canteloup/vm_backups/ | tail -1`" "/Users/julian/Documents/Parallels" "/Volumes/canteloup/vm_backups/`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`"

-avh means make an archive, with verbose output in a human readable form.

--delete will make sure each incremental backup does not contain files that have been deleted since the last backup. It means the backup taken on a particular date will be a snapshot of the directory as it was on that date.

--progress will display in the terminal the amount transferred, the percentage, and the time remaining for each file. Handy for virtual machine backups with 40Gb+ file sizes.

--link-dest specifies the directory to use for making links for the files that haven't changed. It uses ls -rt | tail -1 to get the last file. Seems to be fine if the file doesn't exist, as in the first time it is run.

The next arg is the directory to backup.

The last arg is the target directory. The name is a timestamp.

---

Try the following bash script. Please replace src and dest with the source and destination you want to use. If you are not backing up in a local storage then remove --inplace (This option is useful for transfer of large files with block-based changes or appended data, and also on systems that are disk bound, not network bound. you should also not use this option to update files that are being accessed by others).

#!/bin/bash

rsync -ab --dry-run --stats --human-readable --inplace --debug=NONE --log-file=rsync.log --backup-dir=rsync_bak.$(date +"%d-%m-%y_%I-%M-%S%P") --log-file-format='%t %f %o %M' --delete-after src dest | sed -e '1d;5,12d;14,17d'

echo -e "\nDo you want to continue?"

while true; do
    case $yn in
        [Yy]* ) rsync -ab --human-readable --inplace --info=PROGRESS2,BACKUP,DEL --debug=NONE --log-file=rsync.log --backup-dir=rsync_bak.$(date +"%d-%m-%y_%I-%M-%S%P") --log-file-format='%t %f %o %M' --delete-after src dest; break;;
        [Nn]* ) exit;;
        * ) read -p "Please answer yes or no: " yn;;
    esac
done