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Devator
Asked: 2012-03-14 04:46:38 +0800 CST

rsync incremental history

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I'm trying to create a backup of a LVM volume and I have a simple img file which contains all data. Is there any way to have this have incrementally backed up using rsync? Like a full backup every week, then each consecutive day an incremental backup until the full backup is again.

I'd like let's say restore to the backup made on Wednesday (similar as rdiff-backup can do, but rdiff-backup only support multiple files).

So: is it possible with rsync to have full and incremental backups and destroy the oldest (using a weekly 'rotation'?

linux rsync

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Do you mean to incrementally backup the whole .img file? In that case: No, it's not possible with rsync.

    To do that, you could use a file system that supports efficient snapshots, like Btrfs or ZFS, or try to use rdiff-backup.

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  2. I'm not aware of any open source tool which can do efficient incremental backups of large files. BUP might be worth keeping an eye on, but beware the warnings. I believe there are several commercial backup applications that are designed for external backup of VM images (implying that, if they are worth anything, that they support efficient incremental backups of images), but I have no personal experience of any of those.

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