I'm trying to take backup for my data for rhel, but I not able to take all backup. Could anybody help show me how I take incremental and full backups? What is the process?
3 Answers
There are multiple programs you can use. I'll list only few of those:
- duplicity: incremental backups with encryption. Robust command set. Examples of usage.
- rdiff-backup: takes reverse diffs. Means that newest version is always complete without adding any incrementals. That way broken incremental is not destroying any files. Usage examples
- tar: very simple way to take incremental backups, see for example this.
As I think rdiff-backup is excellent for simple backups, I'll cover it better here.
Assuming you have usb disk mounted to /mnt/backupdisk
. You can take new backup using
sudo rdiff-backup /home /mnt/backupdisk
Files in /mnt/backupdisk
are newest version. Older versions are saved in rdiff-backup-data
subfolder. Restoring newest file can be done just by copying whatever you need, for example
cp /mnt/backupdisk/home/username/.profile /home/username/.profile
If you want to (automatically or manually) delete old backups (you don't want to keep those forever, unless you have infinite disk space), you can use
rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 2W /mnt/backupdisk
to remove backups older than two weeks (change as it's appropriate).
A very comfortable and easy to maintain solution is backuppc which uses tar or rsync, pooling techniques and automatic incremental backups. You control it through a web gui.
Personally, I use rsnapshot, which uses hardlinks to create full backups, while only using the disk space of incremental backups.
This way, I have 7 backups of my server, but in total it only costs me 100% of disk space for the first backup and <5% for the next 6. But i'm always assured of having a full backup around.