Re: NAS Backup solution?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On 07 Jul 2025 23:47:57 +0100 (BST), Theo wrote:
 

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
On Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:58:38 +0100, Brian Howlett wrote:
>

I bought a USB drive and formatted it to ext4 and used rsync to back
up the Pi 5.

>
Don’t forget the tips on how to keep a rolling set of timestamped
backups, without needing space for extra copies of files which haven’t
changed.

>
rsnapshot does that for you, using rsync and hard links.

 
Sure, these convenient wrappers around rsync handle some common cases
with less work. But they still don’t offer the full power and
generality of rsync itself.
 
Also, rsnapshot refers to this article
<http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/>, which has been
obsoleted by the addition of --link-dest to rsync. Does rsnapshot make
use of that to simplify things?

That page is 20 years old!

The rsnapshot utilitiy will take care of rotating your snapshots (keeping
N daily/weekly/monthly etc) which pure rsync won't do.

It looks like it can optionally use --link-dest with a config option:

  link_dest           1

  If your version of rsync supports --link-dest (2.5.7 or newer), you can
  enable this to let rsync handle some things that GNU cp or the built-in
  subroutines would otherwise do.  Enabling this makes rsnapshot take a
  slightly more complicated code branch, but it's the best way to support
  special files on non-Linux systems.

Theo