Setting up Rsnapshot for casual manual backup?

Question

I am confused with new Rsnapshot configuration. In current version there is a different way of specifiying backup intervals, like so:

retain hourly  2
retain weekly  7
retain monthly 2

I would like to do a manual backup few times a month. I'd like to have 3 archives saved. How should I set up the above code?

Answer 1

Short answer: replace this with

retain manual 3

and run rsnapshot manual whenever you'd like to do a backup.

The default configuration defines three different “backup levels.” The idea is that you run rsnapshot hourly every few hours, rsnapshot weekly every week, and rsnapshot monthly every month (usually from cron jobs). When rsnapshot weekly gets run, it moves the oldest hourly backup to a weekly backup; when rsnapshot monthly gets run, it moves the oldest weekly backup to a monthly backup.

The names for these backup levels, however, are totally arbitrary – there's nothing about rsnapshot that requires you to back up hourly, weekly, and daily. So if you just replace the backup levels with one of your own – a manual level – you can just run rsnapshot manual whenever you want, and it'll do a full incremental backup of whatever you've selected in rsnapshot.conf.