gossin-backup

This script makes a full backup in basedest the first time it is executed on a new day. Subsequent backups on the same day are level one incremental backups. It keeps all backups from the current day, the first backup made from each of the last days, months and years.

The key feature of this script is that all full backups are made using hardlinks to unchanged files (file-level deduplication), thereby being storage efficient.

Credits to Mike Rubel, http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ (and everyone who have published similar articles based on Mike Rubels work)

Dependencies

Requires the packages crudini and rsync

Installation

1. Put gossin-backup and gossin-backup.conf in the same directory (e.g. /opt/gossin-backup/), make sure gossin-backup is executable (chmod +x gossin-backup)
2. Specify the location of the rsyncexcludes file in gossin-backup.conf (default /opt/gossin-backup/)
3. Specify the location of source (where to copy from, e.g. /home/) and basedest in gossin-backup.conf
4. Create the directory for basedest (where to copy to, e.g. /backups), and make yourself the owner of it (sudo chown USER:GROUP DIR) if you will not be running this as root (Note: basedest has to be either an empty directory, or a directory where backups from the same source exists from previous use of this script)
5. Add a crontab entry specifying when you want to run it, e.g. every half hour (quarter past and quarter to):

15,45 * * * * username /opt/gossin-backup/gossin-backup

Limitations

• This script has only been tested on Ubuntu (12.04, 14.04 and 16.04).
• (issue) Every run generates "No such file or directory" for month and year backups before they exist for the first time (I know, I really should fix this)

Author

gossin-backup was written by Erik Hjelmås, [email protected]