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I am currently needing to create a backup of something on my server. I zip the entire folder and it's about 1.5gb big...it has to be backed up every hour....

Alright so the size of the backup is getting bigger and bigger every day. So I need a way to backup better.

I'd like some suggestions on how to do this.

But what I was thinking was that every 3 days the third day backups are deleted. But one is kept.

This would mean that my backup total is 73.5gb after 3 days of backups. Then I want to keep that third day backup for 1 week. So on the 10th day it is deleted. So about 85gb of total data is backed up.

Ever hour for 2 days and then 1 hour from every day after that 8 times.

I was thinking the easiest way to do it would be move that 1 hour backup from the third day to a new folder and have a separate script for it that is run daily. However I am not sure how I would go about picking out one of them out from the others and how to delete the ones older than 2 days.

I would likely run these scripts as cronjobs and set them to daily.

I use centOS 64bit 5.7, any tips would be great....incremental backups are NOT an option.

Also, is there an easy way to sync my home PC to a website to download the newest file on there at a particular time? I want this for the backups. I've seen some nice php webpages where it makes a simple filemanager to download files from...perhaps something like this?

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Why are incrementals not an option? They're used in every single enterprise backups solution out there, and are more or less the industry best practice for large backup sets. – ErikA Jan 16 at 17:20
The data will corrupt if incrementals are used – Josip Gòdly Zirdum Jan 16 at 17:25
What is the nature of this data you're backing up? About the only type of data that can't be (easily) backed up with standard incremental backups are databases, in which case you're probably getting crap backups anyway by just zipping the folder. With non-database data, I have never seen instances of data corruption. – ErikA Jan 16 at 17:27
Live gamedata, i've read many instances of where the data will corrupt if a full backup is not done. – Josip Gòdly Zirdum Jan 16 at 17:29
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Sounds like symptoms of people using poorly implemented backups solutions or not understanding how to properly restore incrementals. Regardless, sounds like something you probably ought to test. – ErikA Jan 16 at 17:32
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Forget trying to homebrew a backup solution - it's false economy (as you've found out). Use one of the very good F/OSS backup solutions out there. Bacula, BackupPC, and Zmanda to name a few. Any of these will be quite easy to set up, and will automate all of this so you don't need to worry about manually expiring backup sets, running out of disk space, etc.

Additionally, as noted in my comment above, I'd seriously reconsider your "no incrementals" requirement. Do a full backup every night, and then hourly incrementals or differentials. That will give you a good balance of being able to do timely restores, but also significantly reducing the size of your backup data pool.

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Or if incrementals are out, how about differentials? – Chris S♦ Jan 16 at 17:24
Sure, diffs would certainly be just fine as well. – ErikA Jan 16 at 17:25
Would you have any software to recommend that has a web interface, i'd prefer not to have to do too much command line. – Josip Gòdly Zirdum Jan 16 at 19:23
Arkeia has a free (open source) version. It has a web interface, but functionality is limited since it's free. www.arkeia.com – churnd Jan 16 at 21:01
All of the options listed in my answer have web interfaces. – ErikA Jan 16 at 21:03
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