[kneckebrot]

> half-assed rsync and shell script abomination

I don’t understand the author’s difficulties with a minimalist bash-wrapped rsync-based backup. You can even hardlink to unchanged files from a previous backup to save space.

This is how I wrap rsync: https://github.com/kaumanns/snapshot

And regarding file permissions: why not simply use an EXT4 backup drive instead of an FAT32 one? Non-rhetorical question.

My home network Raspberry has an HDD attached which gets fired up every couple days for a fresh snapshot of $HOME. The only thing I am missing is redundancy. And possibly encryption.

[linsomniac]

Getting an rsync wrapper to be robust takes some work. The wrapper script I use evolved over things I found while running it across ~200 hosts nightly for a couple years. It started as one of those hardlink scripts, but evolved into using zfs snapshots. My goal was to have it be the ultimate in reliability though, I wanted it to just work as much as possible, but be quiet unless the backup failed, at which point it should let me know.

15 years later, nightly backups across maybe 300 machines, this is what I have:

https://github.com/tummy-dot-com/tummy-backup/blob/master/sb...

[tomrod]

This is very elegant! Thank you for sharing. I look forward to studying it a bit deeper.