Rdiff-backup
- The correct title of this article is rdiff-backup. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions.
rdiff-backup is a command line tool that backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.
Installation
- Step 1: Make sure you have
librsyncinstalled on your system. If not downlaod the package, extract the contents, and then execute the following commands:
./configure make make install ldconfig
- Step 2: Install
rdiff-backup
python setup.py install
That's it! You are ready to start making regular backups.
Using rdiff-backup
- In most cases, the command
rdiff-backup dir1 dir2
will work out-of-the-box to backup dir1 to dir2.
rdiff-backup dir1 user@system::/dir2
will backup dir1 to dir2 on a different system (provided rdiff-backup is installed on both systems). rdiff-backup also comes with a lot of up-to-date documentation.
