ZoneO-tips for Mandriva Linux

Need help with Linux? Well, I've been dealing with Linux for some time now, and I love it. But, like with any other computer system, there are still a few glitches that can cause you trouble... and since I never remember how I worked around an issue, I decided to take some notes and make them accessible to the community!

If you do not find your answer here, these are also great sources of information: the Linux Documentation Project, the Mandriva Club and its forums, and as usual, google is a gold mine, if you can filter the answers!

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Incremental backup on external hard disk: rsync and hard links, 07/31/2003

A few weeks ago, I wanted to install some form of incremental backup of my home directory on an external hard-drive. I wanted to have something like

backup every morning at 5AM and keep it for a week
backup every sunday at 5AM and keep it for four weeks
backup every first day of the month at 5AM and keep it for one year

I could have set up a cron job to do that with a plain cp command but the space need would have been huge!

I posted a message on the net and got a great answer: use rsync and hard links... I knew about rsync but did not even know what a hard link was at that point. However, this web page was of great help http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/. It explains everything:

cron for automated runs,
rsync for synchronisation,
hard links (cp -al) for saving space,
and mount/unmount commands to perform the backup on read-only partitions.

Even better, you can also download ready-made scripts that do everything for you with little modification...

Thanks a lot Mike Rubel!