Storage efficient backup with rsync on Linux

published 08 August 2021

How I backup my home directory on Linux with rsync

My requirements

fast & efficient
keep Linux file permissions
incremental backups
don’t backup unimportant files like browser cache
only standard tools should be required
backup content should be easy to access and restore

The backup script

This is my backup-home.sh shell script:

#!/bin/sh

source=/home/oli/
target=/media/oli/Seagate_4TB/Backup/vostro/rsync-tool/
today=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

rsync -av --delete --exclude-from=/home/oli/rsync-homedir-excludes/rsync-homedir-excludes.txt \
        "${source}"  "${target}${today}/" --link-dest="${target}last/"

ln -nsf "${target}${today}" "${target}last"

exit 0

How to use

make the script executable: chmod +x backup-home.sh
copy it to a folder of our PATH : cp backup-home.sh ~/.local/bin
get a copy of rsync-homedir-excludes/rsync-homedir-excludes.txt and modify it to your needs
create a linux partition on an external drive, like Ext4 or XFS
plug in the external drive to store the backup
open a terminal an run backup-home.sh to start a new backup

Result

The backup will create a new folder for the current date in the target directory:

drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Mai  1 13:23 2021-05-01
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Mai  2 08:14 2021-05-02
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Mai 13 09:26 2021-05-13
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Mai 16 09:27 2021-05-16
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Mai 23 08:27 2021-05-23
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Jul 25 08:52 2021-07-25
drwxr-xr-x 52 oli oli 4096 Aug  8 09:19 2021-08-08
lrwxrwxrwx  1 oli oli   58 Aug  8 09:39 last -> /media/oli/Seagate_4TB/Backup/vostro/rsync-tool/2021-08-08

Every folder will contain a full copy of the source directory at the respective date, but will require just the storage space of the new and changed files. All unchanged files will be hard-linked, so they will just use an inode.

Even on my 10 years old Laptop with USB 2.0 the backup of the home partition takes just some minutes, due to the efficiency of rsync

Projects/html/oliworx.github.com/.git/refs/remotes/origin/master
Projects/html/oliworx.github.com/.github/workflows/
Projects/html/oliworx.github.com/.github/workflows/website.yml

sent 142,744,045 bytes  received 44,245 bytes  574,600.76 bytes/sec
total size is 266,349,471,150  speedup is 1,865.35
oli@mx:~$ 

Tags: #backup, #shell, #terminal, #rsync