Rdiff-backup

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Revision as of 18:47, 31 March 2009 by imported>ChrisM (New page: == Introduction == rdiff-backup is a tool written in Python to create incremental backups which allow you to go back to any point of time (where you made a backup) and extract files from ...)
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Introduction

rdiff-backup is a tool written in Python to create incremental backups which allow you to go back to any point of time (where you made a backup) and extract files from then. Since rdiff-backup actually makes reverse-incremental backups, the latest state (created the last time you ran rdiff-backup) is accessable in plain text, which means:

  • If you want the latest version, you can just throw away the "rdiff-backup-data" folder containg meta information.
  • Going back in time takes longer, the more far back you want to go.
  • Deleting old "snapshots" is a very fast operation, because it involves only deleting the oldest diffs but not rebasing any diffs to other plain text content.

Installation

rdiff-backup is available as a package for all major distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora and (TODO!: probably, not checked because I have not access to any) OpenSuSE.