Simple bash script to make a hard linked differential backup pulled from remote machines. Only dependency on the remote is rsync. If you want compression and checksumming use zfs or btrfs file system on the target machine.
This script is intended for low volume backups. Use something more suited if you want to backup massive amount of files. There is solutions that does this with more features as
and many more...
Backups will be stored in destination directory with the structure below. A link latest will be created and point to the latest backup after each run.
.
└── my.domain.com
├── 2021-03-06T17:22:38+00:00
├── 2021-03-06T17:23:07+00:00
├── 2021-03-06T17:23:11+00:00
├── 2021-03-06T17:23:27+00:00
├── 2021-03-06T17:23:35+00:00
└── latest -> 2021-03-06T17:23:35+00:00
rsnap [-h] [-v] [-I] [-i FILENAME] [-e PATTERN] [-d DAYS] [-n NUMBER] [-p PATH] [-s SERVER] PATH...
rsnap creates rsync snapshots of one or more paths on a remote
location. Specify number of snapshots to keep and/or max age in days.
Snapshot name format: 2021-03-06T10:25:45+00:00. A link, latest, point to
the latest snapshot.
-d DAYS number of days to keep snapshots
-e PATTERN exclude files/paths, can be added multiple times
-i FILENAME if file exists in directory, ignore directory
-I ignore missing remote directory or server
-n NUMBER max number of snapshots to keep
-p PATH destination path, autocreated if missing
-s SERVER server to rsync from, user@server may be used
-v LEVEL verbosity level where 1=ERROR, 2=WARN, 3=INFO, 4=DEBUG
Snapshot one or more paths on the remote server.
Example: Make backup of my.domain.com:/var/backups and my.domain.com:/etc
to this servers /srv/backups. Keep 90 days of snapshots or max 30 snapshots.
Skip folders including .rsnap-skip and and ignore shadow files.
rsnap -n 30 -d 90 \
-i .rsnap-skip \
-e shadow* \
-p /srv/backups \
-s my.domain \
/var/backups /etc