GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Simple Backup

With the philosophy of keeping it simple, one approach is to simply use find and tar to find all changes since your last backup and put them into a compressed tar file. You can do daily, 7 day, or 32 day incremental backups, with a full backup weekly, monthly, or quarterly. You can create a script, perhaps called do-backup.sh in /root, as root:

  #!/bin/bash
  DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%R | tr -d ':')
  DAYS=32
  
  cd / 
  find home etc usr/local -type f -mtime -${DAYS} \
  | egrep -iv '(.bak|.mp3|cache|trash|~$)' \
  | tar zcvf /root/backup-${DATE}-last-${DAYS}.tgz -T -

You can use cron to perform the daily, weekly, or monthly incremental backups. Refer to http://www.linux-backup.net/scripts/Backup.pland http://www.Linux-Backup.net/App for further information.

Note that tar can handle incremental backups with the -g (and -M, for multiple tapes) options.