Rsync is a powerful software to do some backups of your system, and like the Apple Time Machine, it can do incremental backups to avoid using unnecessary space.
So rsync is a great tool to do backups, but it needs some additional features to make it really cool for system backups, and that the goal of these scripts.
Backups are made with the backup-full-system.sh script.It sorts all your
backups in this architecture :
backups_dir/year/month/day-month-year-hour:minute:second/.
A symbolic link is created at the backups dir root, named current_backup,
which points on the last backup.
It calls the delete-old-backups.sh to clean your old backups. See the
appropriate section for more informations.
If you want to use this script in a cronjob (for example), you might want to
log everything, to see if there an error happened during the backup or
something. You can use the -o LOGFILE option, where LOGFILE is the file
where you want to log all the output.
If you want to start a backup manually, maybe you want to write a changelog, so
just launch this script with the -i option. It uses your EDITOR environment
variable, so if it doesn't open the text editor you are using to use, please
set this variable in your shell configuration (.bashrc, .zshrc etc...). It will
save the changelog in a changelog directory, in the backups dir root.
Use the option -h to print the help.
No surprise again, the script delete-old-backups.sh will... delete old
backups ! It will keep all the backups for current day, one backup by day for
the last 30 days and before it's one backup by month (for the moment, maybe I
will add the "one backup by year" and doing it more customizable). For each
case, it will keep the last backup (so the last backup of the day or month).
restore-full-system.sh BACKUP_DIR, where BACKUP_DIR is the path of the
backup you want to restore (not to confound with the BACKUPS_BASE_DIR you
have set in the configuration file).
Use the option -h to print the help.
Copy the easy-incremental-backups.conf.default configuration file as
easy-incremental-backups.conf and modify it for your setup.
Do not edit directly this file, always make a copy before, it will avoid some conflits with git if you pull from this repository