[Discuss] full disk backups

[Kent Borg]

On 8/17/19 11:06 AM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> Any recommendations for something to use for a full disk backup and 
> easy recovery?  My first thought was dd or rsync.

I suggest rsync to an external disk. The result is mountable and 
requires no special anything to use.

For doing routine backups I use a homebrew script and rsync's link-dest 
feature: The result is a I get incremental backups, each is it's own 
directory, but common files are hard links to one copy of the file. I 
imagine having so many directory entries for relative few files might 
cause some resource problems with some file systems, but it seems to 
work with me. I ping-pong between different disks so I don't have all my 
data plugged together at once.

The result is pretty cool...yet it still doesn't require anything 
special to use.

Oh, and I do a fully encrypted file system, so it does require the 
passphrase to use.

-kb