what is the difference between rsnapshot and rdiffbackup?

Question

What is the difference between rsnapshot and rdiffbackup?

Which is better for backing up a new snapshot of my laptop (over the Internet from some remote location) to my server (which already has the previous backup) ?

As far as I can tell, they both store (on the backup server) the latest backup and many previous versions of backed-up files (in the form of compressed reverse-incremental deltas). They both use rsync to make backups over the internet faster.

Answer 1

Quoting from http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/02/backup-on-linux-rsnapshot-vs-rdiff/ :

For rsnapshot, all versions of the backup are accessible as plain files. For rdiff-backup, only the current backup is accessible as plain files. Previous versions are stored as rdiff deltas.

also:

For small files, storage size is similar. For large files that change often, such as logfiles, databases, etc., rdiff-backup requires significantly less space for a given number of versions.

The page lists some other differences also.