What's the best way to back up my media library to an external hard drive from Ubuntu?

Question

My media library isn't huge, but it isn't tiny (~50 GB). Every month or so, I just manually copy ~/Music, ~/Pictures, and ~/Videos to my EHD, and delete the old backup. But this is far from ideal. It's pretty slow, for one thing (~50 GB all together). It also isn't versioned, so if I ever want to go back multiple versions, I'm out of luck.

Is there any simple, stable, incremental way to do this? I'm open to using traditional version control systems like Git for it, although I haven't used them before for anything other than code. Command-line is fine (especially if it's scriptable). I only need to back up these 3 folders--anything that's not media is stored in my Dropbox. Any ideas?

Edit: Here is the script I ended up using (thanks Mistiry):

#!/bin/sh

rsync --delete --size-only -ravv /home/matthew/Music "/media/My Passport/backup/Music"
rsync --delete --size-only -ravv /home/matthew/Pictures "/media/My Passport/backup/Pictures"
rsync --delete --size-only -ravv /home/matthew/Videos "/media/My Passport/backup/Videos"

I found --progress wasn't particularly useful, since my music is organized by albums, and each album is only around ~100mb. If it is possible to show progress for the entire rsync operation, that would be much more useful.

I used --delete so that if I clean up my library locally, it will also clean up the backup.

The vv just puts it in verbose mode, because I'm new to rsync, and I want to know if anything goes wrong.

Answer 1

Use the program rsync, which works like an incremental backup and won't back up files that haven't changed.

Here are a few different options (obviously, change the target directory. I'm using /mnt/usb in my examples):

rsync -ra ~/Music /mnt/usb

This will recursively archive sync your files, meaning it will copy everything including directories, and will preserve ownership, timestamps, etc.

rsync -r --size-only ~/Music /mnt/usb

This will recursively sync your files, using only the file sizes to compare files (requires less CPU power, so is faster).

rsync -raz --progress --size-only ~/Music /mnt/usb

This will recursively archive compress sync your files (z means compress), using only the file sizes to compare files, and compress them before syncing. This requires more CPU, so is slower.

(Note: -ra is the same as -a. Here, -r is included just for clarity.)

Since this is something you do on a regular basis, you can add something like this to your crontab (run crontab -e to change your crontab):

* 21 1 * * /usr/bin/rsync -r --size-only ~/Music /mnt/usb
* 22 1 * * /usr/bin/rsync -r --size-only ~/Pictures /mnt/usb
* 23 1 * * /usr/bin/rsync -r --size-only ~/Videos /mnt/usb

In the above example, at 9:00pm on the 1st day of every month, your ~/Music directory will sync to /mnt/usb. At 10:00pm, ~/Pictures and at 11:00pm, ~/Videos.