<story><title>Incremental Backups Using GNU Tar and S3</title><url>https://ops.tips/blog/incremental-backup-linux/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rsync</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re intrigued by using basic unix primitives for tasks like this you&amp;#x27;d probably also be intrigued by a cloud storage product that &lt;i&gt;was built to act like a unix primitive&lt;/i&gt;.[1][2]&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re interested in point-in-time snapshots, you&amp;#x27;re probably also intrigued by our ZFS platform that gives you day&amp;#x2F;week&amp;#x2F;month&amp;#x2F;quarter&amp;#x2F;year snapshots that you don&amp;#x27;t have to configure or maintain - you just do a &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; rsync (or whatever) to us and the snapshots just appear.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re interested in &lt;i&gt;encrypted backups&lt;/i&gt; you should look into the &amp;#x27;borg backup&amp;#x27; tool which has become the de facto standard for remote, encrypted, changes-only-upload backups.[3][4]&lt;p&gt;Finally, if S3 pricing is important, you should email us about our &amp;quot;HN Readers&amp;#x27;&amp;quot; discount.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rsync.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rsync.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] Examples:  &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rsync.net&amp;#x2F;resources&amp;#x2F;howto&amp;#x2F;remote_commands.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rsync.net&amp;#x2F;resources&amp;#x2F;howto&amp;#x2F;remote_commands.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stavros.io&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;holy-grail-backups&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stavros.io&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;holy-grail-backups&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rsync.net&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;attic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rsync.net&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;attic.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Incremental Backups Using GNU Tar and S3</title><url>https://ops.tips/blog/incremental-backup-linux/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>funkaster</author><text>I used to have a &amp;quot;poor man&amp;#x27;s time machine&amp;quot; system based on rsync + hard links to files that didn&amp;#x27;t change with new backups. Essentially it was the same concept than time machine. Of course you couldn&amp;#x27;t upload a single &amp;quot;snapshot&amp;quot; because tar wouldn&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s a hard link. One advantage of using rsync is that you can also keep track of things you delete.&lt;p&gt;Today I&amp;#x27;m using zfs with real snapshots. For systems with no zfs support (my wife&amp;#x27;s iMac for instance), I have a zfs fs that those systems rsync to, after the rsync is done I create a snapshot. All scripted. The snapshots can be stored in another server for an additional layer of backup, or incrementally send them to s3 if you want.</text></comment>