Differential Backup Utility?

hansolo77

I've got my system running very stable, and I routinely make a backup image of my SD card. However, all of my roms are stored on an exernal USB drive I have connected to my Pi. Does anybody know of a utility that will scan that drive and create incremental/differential backups, preferably to a network location (although not necessary if it's not possible, I could always manually move the backup archive)? Ideally what I'm looking for is something simple I can configure once, then run every now and then to backup any new changes. I just dread the idea of losing all my stuff after spending years getting it set up.

Raspberry Pi 3 System

mitu

@hansolo77 rsync is pretty much the reference utility in Linux, it will cleverly synchronize your folder's contents to another destination.
rdiff-backup or duplicity can be used for differential backups have more options for the backup destination (Gdrive, S3, SSH, etc.)

Jono

If you want something less CLI, you could just use an FTP client and set overwrite to only newer files... I use Filezilla and it does the job well and is a better transfer tool than WinSCP for example.

Clyde

@mito beat me to rsync, so I'll just add dirvish as another great command line tool that uses rsync to manage incremental backups. Although incremental, every backup is a complete copy by using hard links to store identical files just once on the backup medium. The setup requires a bit of reading, but once done it's just run manually or as a cronjob without further user interaction.

hansolo77

I've heard of rsrync, but that's the extent of it.. "heard". Linux is still very new to me so I've not fully developed a working relationship with it. After posting my question, I did go ahead and start copying files through FTP, using WinSCP because it's a program and method I'm familiar with. I'm not sure how well the next run (updated files) will work.

Are there any recommendations with rsync? Having heard of it, it seems like probably the best place to start. Is there any "for dummies" documentation somewhere or some simple instructions? Does it come with Jessie, or is it something I'll have to manually install?

mitu

@hansolo77 All the utilities I quoted are available by default on Raspbian, you just need to install them with sudo apt-get install <package>.

Clyde

@hansolo77 said in Differential Backup Utility?:

Is there any "for dummies" documentation somewhere or some simple instructions?

https://www.ixquick.com/do/search?q=rsync+for+dummies ;)