2012-07-20 rsync backups
I have a job that creates backups of my sites using rsync. My sites are in Germany and the USA, the backups are in Canada and Chile. The point was to protect myself against hosting services disappearing and my sites getting lost. Recently I was thinking about data corruption, however. As soon as the cronjob writes the corrupted data to the backups, there is no way to retrieve my data. (There is in fact a third backup: every few weeks I use rsync to copy the remote sites to one of a rotating set of mobile disks, one of which is always outside our apartment.)
There is in fact an option for rsync which will allow you to create copies of your file tree at certain intervals using hard links for the files that haven’t changed. I found a tutorial on how to do it: Time Machine for every Unix out there subtitled “Using rsync to mimic the behavior of Apple’s Time Machine feature.”
Time Machine for every Unix out there
And that’s exactly what I did.
*Update*: I soon disabled it again because I was running out of disk space. 😄
#Backup #Software
**2019-04-11**. A better link: rsync-time-backup “offers Time Machine-style backup using rsync. It creates incremental backups of files and directories to the destination of your choice. The backups are structured in a way that makes it easy to recover any file at any point in time.”
**2024-10-28**. For the sqlite database out there, I really should skip them in the rsync backups and recreate them later using sqlite3_rsync.