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Using rsync for backups, because it's not shiny and new (tinkerbetter.tube)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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You might not even like rsync. Yeah it's old. Yeah it's slow. But if you're working with Linux you're going to need to know it.

In this video I walk through my favorite everyday flags for rsync.

Support the channel:
https://patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
https://ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
https://thestopbits.bandcamp.com

Here's a companion blog post, where I cover a bit more detail: https://vkc.sh/everyday-rsync

Also, @BreadOnPenguins made an awesome rsync video and you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifQI5uD6VQ

Lastly, I left out all of the ssh setup stuff because I made a video about that and the blog post goes into a smidge more detail. If you want to see a video covering the basics of using SSH, I made one a few years ago and it's still pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKsdbjzBcc

Chapters:
1:18 Invoking rsync
4:05 The --delete flag for rsync
5:30 Compression flag: -z
6:02 Using tmux and rsync together
6:30 but Veronica... why not use (insert shiny object here)

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[–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You get incremental backups (snapshots) by using

    --link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.)

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