Backup with rsync

Millions of years after the last post I decided to make it come to live again, lets see for how long.

Simple, simple thing to start the new era, that's how I am usually making the backups from my work directory in my machine to the external disk:

rsync -av --link-dest=/Backups/2010-09-07/ ~/Work/ /Backups//2010-09-08/

This way everything that already exists in the previous backup (2010-09-10 directory) will be hard linked to the new backup, so my space is not all wasted and I can keep track of what was changed from backup to backup.

That's funny how the size is shown when you use those hard links:

$ mkdir 1 2

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./1/somefile bs=1k count=5120

5120+0 records in
5120+0 records out
5242880 bytes (5.2 MB) copied, 0.0218812 s, 240 MB/s

$ ls -lrth *
2:
total 0

1:
total 5.0M
-rw-r--r-- 1 andre wheel 5.0M Sep 13 17:32 somefile

$ ln 1/somefile 2/somefile-hard-link

$ ls -lrth *
1:
total 5.0M
-rw-r--r-- 2 andre wheel 5.0M Sep 13 17:32 somefile

2:
total 5.0M
-rw-r--r-- 2 andre wheel 5.0M Sep 13 17:32 somefile-hard-link

$ du -ksh *
5.0M    1
0       2

$ rm 1/somefile

$ ls -lrth *
2:
total 5.0M
-rw-r--r-- 1 andre wheel 5.0M Sep 13 17:32 somefile-hard-link

1:
total 0

$ du -ksh *
0       1
5.0M    2

Nice, hm?