rsync to create directory based on date

Question

I am using rsync and crontab to schedule a nightly backup.

However, want to do a full-backup and not incremental.

I am using the following rsync in my script file.

rsync -razv [email protected]:repos /home/backup_sys_user/repos_backup

And I want to create the structure below:

/repos_backup/10.10.2010
             /11.10.2010
             /12.10.2010

Is there anyway rsync can do this. I know if can create the directory using the --backup-dir=DIR but this is only for incremental. I want to do a full backup.

Many thanks for any advice,

Answer 1

DATE=`date +%m.%d.%Y`
rsync -razv [email protected]:repos /home/backup_sys_user/repos_backup/$DATE

However, you might want to look at using --link-dest which will create backups with hardlinks, then, deleting older backups will still leave you with a full copy, but, you'll only take up the disk space for the changed files.

Answer 2

karmawhore has it generally right, but instead of manually using "--link-dest", you may want to check out rsnapshot:

http://rsnapshot.org/

Also, for large numbers of files I'd recommend using a version of rsync in the 3.x range because of this key improvement:

- A new incremental-recursion algorithm is now used when rsync is talking
  to another 3.x version.  This starts the transfer going more quickly
  (before all the files have been found), and requires much less memory.
  See the --recursive option in the manpage for some restrictions.