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Using rsync for backups, because it's not shiny and new
(tinkerbetter.tube)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Maybe I am missing something but how does it handle snapshots?
I use rsync all the time but only for moving data around effectively. But not for backups as it doesn't (AFAIK) hanld snapshots
You get incremental backups (snapshots) by using
To use this you pass in the previous snapshot location as DIR and use a new destination directory for the current snapshot. This creates hard links in the new snapshot to the files which were unchanged from the previous snapshot, so only the new files are transferred, and there is no duplication of data on disk (for whole-file matches).
This does of course require that all of the snapshots exist in the same filesystem, since you cannot hard-link across filesystems.
Ah, I didn't know of this. This should be in the linked article! Because it's one of the ways to turn rsync into a real backup! (I didn't know this flag- I thought this was the main point of rdiff-backup.)
yeah, it doesn't, it's just for file transfer. It's only useful if transferring files somewhere else counts as a backup for you.
To me, the file transfer is just a small component of a backup tool.