Using rsync to maintain backups on Linux

April 22nd, 2008
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Following on from my previous article, regarding Setting up and using NFS on Ubuntu, here’s how I keep backups for quite a few clients.

On a particular site I maintain a single backup server that several clients backup to on a nightly basis.

rsync is great. Its one of those incredibly old, under rated and under used tools that come with pretty much all Linux distros.

The following rsync command takes a backup of a directory on a server and backs it up to another whilst keeping a backup of orphaned/deleted files over NFS.

rsync -ahvz --exclude=*.log --backup
--backup-dir=<DESTINATION SERVER SHARE>`hostname`/orphans-`date +%Y-%m-%d`
--delete --delete-excluded <DIRECTORY TO BACKUP>
/<DESTINATION SERVER>`hostname`<DIRECTORY NAME>

Simple as.

Note: Remember to clean up your orphaned files on a weekly/regular basis or your hard drive will soon fill up.

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One Response to “Using rsync to maintain backups on Linux”

  1. Setting up and using NFS on Ubuntu | kieran barnes | kieranbarnes Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 16:56

    [...] you just need to devise a way of maintaining backups. Edit: Try my article on Using rsync to maintain backups on Linux Bookmark it del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg [...]

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