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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.
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.
I Would add, for the sake of completeness that there exists rbackup which is just a wrapper script around rdiff-backupto ease snapshot management, more like rsnapshot's way of managing snapshots (easier to configure).
