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Article:		Automated Backups on Tiger Using rsync
Subject:		7 day incremental backup
Date:		2005-10-01 09:26:01
From:		Corvus
Response to: 7 day incremental backup
Hi Anna. I guess I wasn't clear on how `rsync` works; it creates full backups by copying only the data that has changed since the last backup. You don't need to do "full" backups ever again. Suppose you ran `rsync` for the first time on Sunday and it made a copy of your entire 80 GB hard drive. You work on some projects; changing a few bytes in a multi-megabyte database, add a few lines to a text file, add and delete some records from a contact list. When `rsync` runs again that night, it will compare each file on your hard drive, byte-for-byte, with that on the backup drive, and only copy over the bytes that have changed. Only the few bytes changed in your database get copied to the backup. The new lines get added to the backup's copy of your text file, the new contacts get added to your contact list and the old ones get deleted, without affecting any of the other records. `rsync` makes the fewest changes to the target files so they are identical to the source files. It really obsoletes the old full/incremental backup method.

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