On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:27:35PM +0100, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote: > On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Ken Teh wrote: > > >You need to be clear about what you mean by backup. If you are keeping a > >mirror of your data, rsync is fine. But sometimes you want a version of a > >file from 3 months ago. rsync is not going to do that for you. > > I find that rsync with --link-dest is a good starting point for > scripting multiple backups to the same disk (not the one you are > backing up) which are good for recovering files in that scenario. > My favourite backup utility is dirvish. It is based on rsync with --link-dest, but adds a few nice things. One of those is an expiration scheme. One can easily set up nightly backups which, e.g, normaly expire after 2 weeks, but one backup per week will be kept for 3 months, on per month for 1 year, and one every 3 months forever. Another one is dirvish-locate. -- Klaus Wacker [log in to unmask] Experimentelle Physik V http://www.physik.uni-dortmund.de/~wacker TU Dortmund Tel.: +49 231 755 3587 D-44221 Dortmund Fax: +49 231 755 4547