Rsnapshot Basics
Homepage: http://rsnapshot.org Howtos: http://rsnapshot.org/howto/
I use rsnapshot to manage the backups of my main computer and my VPS. It's fairly easy to set up but there are some subtle points that catch me off guard whenever I look at the config file, so I thought I'd get my thoughts down now for posterity.
Most of /etc/rsnapshot.conf is well commented and self explanatory, but one section used to confuse me quite a bit:
#########################################
# BACKUP INTERVALS #
# Must be unique and in ascending order #
# i.e. hourly, daily, weekly, etc. #
#########################################
# an "interval" in this context is a unit of time defined by the time
# between the consecutive runs of rsnapshot (or the time between cron
# runs). The number is the number of backups to make with this time
# interval.
interval daily 7
interval weekly 4
interval monthly 3
The first thing to note is that these config items, by themselves, do absolutely nothing. They do not control how often rsnapshot runs in any way, shape, or form. Instead, one usually controls rsnapshot by running it from a cronjob.
The second thing to note is that the "daily", "weekly" and "monthly" labels are purely arbitrary from rsnapshot's perspective. Certainly, I tried to pick mnemonic names, but rsnapshot doesn't care what they are and I could have used labels like "aaa", "bbb", and "ccc" and everything would have worked perfectly fine.
Basically, each interval line is supposed to represent a certain interval of time. Just how long that interval is depends on how often you run rsnapshot. When you run rsnapshot, you feed it one of these labels, like so:
rsnapshot daily
rsnapshot will look in its backup directory. If there's nothing there, it will copy the contents of the directories it's backing up into a directory called "daily.0". The next time you run rsnapshot with the daily label, it will see that there's a daily.0 backup already there, so it will move that to daily.1 and make a new daily.0 backup of it's source directories. Because we configured 7 intervals, it will do this until it reaches daily.6\. The end result is 7 snapshots of your source directories after it has run 7 times, with daily.0 always being the most recent snapshot.
One convention that must be followed is that each interval line must represent an interval of time longer than the line before it. This is due to rsnapshot's behavior when you run, for example, the next line after "daily":
rsnapshot weekly
In this case we have 4 weekly intervals. When we run the weekly interval for the first time, we will get a weekly.0 directory, as you'd expect, but the contents are copied from daily.6\. In order for this behavior to make any sense, the weekly interval must be bigger than the daily interval. And so on, for every line.
Finally, I've glossed over how we specify the directories we're backing up. This is easy:
##############################
### BACKUP POINTS / SCRIPTS ###
###############################
# LOCALHOST
backup /home/ zinc/
backup /etc/ zinc/
backup root@something.org:/etc/ something.org/
backup root@something.org:/home/ something.org/</pre>
Each line here will create a separate folder under the appropriate daily.X folder. Note that the remote backup lines are run through SSH.