View on GitHub

Linux-timemachine

Backup with hard links. Save time and space. And your data.

Download this project as a .zip file Download this project as a tar.gz file

Linux Time Machine

Rsync incremental backups with hard links. Save time and space. And your data.

Macs have automatic incremental backups built in through Time Machine

Apple TimeMachine

Linux has rsync, bash and cron. Rsync can use hard links for unchanged files: only files changed since the previous backup are copied. This saves a lot of time and storage space.

A few entries from my personal backup. As you can see, each day gets its own directory. Inside is a complete backup with every file from my workstation. Still, each day takes very little extra space, since only modified files are copied. The rest are hard links. (Don't mind the modification times - they are set by rsync to the last modification time of / on my workstation):

Linux TimeMachine

Prerequisites

How To

Check hard links

To verify that hard linking actually works, use the stat command on a file in the latest backup which you know has not been changed for some time. stat shows a field Links: # which tells how many hard links a file has. My /etc/fstab hasn't changed for a long time:

Stat output

Notes