Rsnapshot VS Rdiff-backup

Two things I want to try this month are:

https://mastodon.social/@chromakode/110936177254839251

https://rsnapshot.org/

I'm using rsnapshot. It's based on rsync. It's fully automated and I make daily and monthly backups backup to my NAS. The biggest benefit of rsnapshot is that it uses hardlinks. So only changed files are backed up. It doesn't have a GUI though, you have to set a configuration file.

For backups, I'm using rsnapshot.

It's been a while but I think rsnapshot is what you're looking for.

The description sounds like it does largely the same job as rsnapshot (https://rsnapshot.org/). What does yours do differently from rsnapshot?

For starters it has a tendency to paint itself into a corner on ENOSPC situations. You won't even be able to perform a restore if a backup was started but unfinished because it ran out of space. There's this process of "regressing" the repo [0] which must occur before you can do practically anything after an interrupted/failed backup. What this actually must do is undo the partial forward progress, by performing what's effectively a restore of the files that got pushed into the future relative to the rest of the repository, which requires more space. Unless you have/can create free space to do these things, it can become wedged... and if it's a dedicated backup system where you've intentionally filled disks up with restore points, you can find yourself having to throw out backups just to make things functional again - even ability to restore is affected.

That's the most obvious glaring problem, beyond that it's just kind of garbage in terms of the amount of space and time it requires to perform restores. Especially restores of files having many reverse-differential increments leading back to the desired restore point. It can require 2X the file's size in spare space to assemble the desired version, while it iteratively reconstructs all the intermediate versions in arriving at the desired version. Unless someone fixed this since I last had to deal with it, which is possible.

Source: Ages ago I worked for a startup[1] that shipped a backup appliance originally implemented by contractors using rdiff-backup. Writing a replacement that didn't suck but was compatible with rdiff-backup's repos consumed several years of my life...

There are far better options in 2024.

[0] https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/src...

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/axcient

and that should install the latest version, rdiff-backup-2.2.4-2.el8.x86_64.rpm. This is all described in the rdiff-backup README file.

Rdiff-backup - close to what you do currently but at least provides versioning. Based on rsync

as in just a copy of your files? This I would barely consider a backup, more of just a mirror from a point in time. What're you missing by doing this? versions of files, deduplication, and encryption (last one being very important for the best kind of backups, which should be off-site). Just because it's not files doesn't mean it's proprietary. Proprietary would mean secret and undocumented. There are many great options. Borg is my favorite but Kopia is probably better if you use windows, urbackup is an option if you want centralized management of backups and rdiff-backup is if you want something kinda what you have currently but adding versioning but lacks deduplication and encryption.

If you're comfortable with the cli and you want to have your backup in a plain file format with some incremental backups, there's rdiffbackup. It uses rsync under the hood and has worked quite well for me.

Rdiff Backup - Reverse differential backups that uses rsync, linking, and can tunnel via ssh. You get a full current backup with increments available to restore any version of the file with minimal storage space used.

borg is great. we've been using it for the past 3 years to archive hundreds of file-level backups of servers, database dumps and VM images. average size of each borg repo is few GB but there are few outliers up to few hundreds of GB.

borg replaced https://rdiff-backup.net/ for us and gave:

Robocopy is great if you don't have access to rsync. If rsync via WSL2 for instance is an option, I'd personally go with rdiffbackup.