Is there a reason you didn’t look at something like rsnapshot?

Change the DAYS value to specify how long to keep old backups, and the BACKUPDIR value to where you want the backups to go. I had it going to a portable USB hard drive that I could lug around with me.

I can’t remember where I got this from, but it worked great for me. Just put it in a cron job like so:

0 0 * * * sh /your_path_here/backup.sh

…or run it whenever you wish.

BACKUPDIR=/backup
EXCLUDES=$BACKUPDIR/backup_exclude
CURRENT=$BACKUPDIR/current
OLD=$BACKUPDIR/old
NOW=`date ‘+%Y-%m’-%d_%H:%M`
NOW=$OLD/$NOW
DAYS=60

# CREATE DIRECTORIES
mkdir -p $CURRENT
mkdir -p $OLD
mkdir $NOW

# RUN RSYNC INTO CURRENT
rsync -apvz –delete –delete-excluded –exclude-from=”$EXCLUDES” / $CURRENT

# UPDATE MTIME TO REFLECT THE SNAPSHOT TIME
touch $CURRENT

# MAKE HARDLINK COPY
cp -al $CURRENT/* $NOW

# REMOVE OLD BACKUPS
echo “Removing old backups…”
for FILE in “$( find $OLD -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +$DAYS )”
do
rm -Rf $FILE
done

exit 0

I’m with you on 1). Windows world it’s generally been OK, but Partition magic is much nicer to me than parted + reiserfs.

2) I’d love to take a look at your script. I’m actually thinking of tooling around with bash and building up a ‘plugin’ based backup system, but I’ve been reading up on differential backup systems and think I should incorporate that as well…

Let me know what you find out! And thanks for tuning back in.

Here is the abbreviated version:

1. I avoid partition resizes like the plague and assume they will wipe my data.

2. I had a cool shell script that did differential backups with rsync that I used to run as a cron job. Do you want me to dig it up or do you have another method in mind?