2011.10 Incremental RSYNC

A simple shell script, called incremental RSYNC, to handle full and incremental backups using the open-source utility RSYNC.

First time run it makes a full backup. On every successive run it makes an incremental backup using RSYNC with the –link-dest option - i.e. it hard-links unchanged files from the last full backup directory and hence saves space. When run more than a user-defined number of days after the last full backup it makes another full backup.

Note: it does not delete any backup directories, it just continues to create new ones.

Command-line options,

irsync TARGET_DIR DESTINATION_DIR [MAXDAYS]

Details,

• TARGET_DIR is the directory that is to be backed up
• DESTINATION_DIR is the directory in which the backups are to be placed
• MAXDAYS is the maximum number of days before doing a FULL backup again (optional, default 30).

If you need to use RSYNC's exclude patterns with irsync, then just place a file called irsync.exclude in the DESTINATION_DIR. When irsync notice the irsync.exclude file it will pass it to RSYNC using the –exclude-from option.

Latest,

• irsync 1.02 (2012.09)

Previous,

• irsync 1.01 (2012.04)
• irsync 1.00 (2011.10)

The irsync log of changes.

Fixed minor bugs only.

Here the backup directories are named using ISO-8601-style dates - i.e. yyyymmddThhmmss_full or yyyymmddThhmmss_inc. Using this name style irsync can perform one backup every second.

A new feature was added in this version: placing a file called irsync.exclude in DESTINATION_DIR makes irsync use the RSYNC –exclude-from option togheter with the irsync.exclude file.

Command calls are now all handled by script parameters initialized hard-coded in the header of the script. Leave them as is or change them to absolute paths to match your system.

Initial version.

Here the backup directories are named YYYYMMDD_full or YYYYMMDD_inc. With these directory names it will only do one backup per day.