Rsync backup

This is the small script I use for online backups with rsync. This includes a one week rotating window. Prior days include only the files that changed, so each day does not take up the full amount of disk. The prior days' backups will appear complete because identical files are hard linked. There's about a hundred versions of this script on the Internet. This one isn't super fancy, but it's small and gets the job done.

When the script complete successfully it will create a file called BACKUP_TIMESTAMP in the root directory of the destination. If the script fails for any reason it will create a file called BACKUP_ERROR. The files will contain the finish date and exit code and message reported by `rsync`.

Setup

This script doesn't require much setup. It will automatically create destination backup directories if they don't exist. After the first time you run it you will see that it creates numbered copies of the source base directory. Each numbered copy appears to be a separate copy, but due to the use of hardlinks each copy takes no more room than one copy plus whatever files have changed between each run of the backup. If you run the backup script from a daily cron job then each numbered directory will correspond to one day in the past.

crontab

To use this script add something similar to the following line to /etc/crontab:

   01 4 * * * backup /usr/bin/rsync_backup /media/shareddocs /home/backup

rsync_backup script

Click here to download: rsync_backup <include svncat src="file:///home/svn/src/shell/rsync_backup" highlight="sh" />

Ken's exclude.list file

My friend, Ken, uses this rsync exclude list.

### tmp ###
- **/tmp/**
### transient ###
- /proc/
- /mnt/
- /cdrom/
- /media/
- /sys/
- /var/run/
- /var/lock/
- /var/log/
- /var/tmp/
- /dev/
### config ###
- /etc/adjtime
- /etc/motd
- /etc/mtab
- /etc/resolv.conf
- /etc/lvm/.cache
- /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
- /var/lib/dhcp3/dhclient.*.leases
- /var/lib/urandom/
- /var/lib/urandom/random-seed
### apps ###
# firefox
- **/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/Cache/**
# bash
- .bash_history
# svn
- .svn/
- .svn/**
# vim
- .viminfo
- .*.swp
# X
+ .cache/sessions/
- .cache/sessions/**
- .xsession-errors
- .ICEauthority
- .serverauth.*
# less
- .lesshst
### backup ###
- *~