checking my understanding of hardlinks and rsync

[Essence_of_War]

I've been imaging my data drive as a back-up method, but the images consume A LOT space, take a long time to do (~15-18hrs) and there is a lot of stuff that doesn't actually change between back-ups. So I thought that I might switch to an incremental back-up with rsync and hardlinks to alleviate this problem. I'll probably do images also, but MUCH less frequently.

Basically, I want to be able to do incremental back-ups of my data folder that includes things like my steam folder, my documents, photos etc.

The data drive is formatted NTFS because I need it to be accessible from both my windows7 and ubuntu 12.04 installations, and similarly, my back-up drive is formatted NTFS for the same reason.

Mounted in Ubuntu, their paths are:
/media/DataDrive
/media/BackUpDrive

So if I started by making a usefully named backup, then doing the rsync:
> BackUp01=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
> rsync -avp /media/DataDrive/MyDataFolder/ /media/BackUpDrive/backups/$BackUp01/
which will take quite a while.

Then when I do the next one, I can make a new backup, copy the hardlink to the previous back-up, and then rsync for any changes:
> BackUp02=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
> cp -al /media/BackUpDrive/backups/$BackUp01/ /media/BackUpDrive/backups/$BackUp02/
> rsync -avp /media/DataDrive/MyDataFolder/ /media/BackUpDrive/backups/$BackUp01/
which should be quite fast.

Does that look about right?

 

[tfinch2]

No need for -p option in your rsync command. The -a (archive) option does this automatically. Other than that, it looks right.

 

[manly]

Consider:
http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/