kieranbarnes do you know where your towel is?

Using rsync to maintain backups on Linux

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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