I’ve read in many places that a good simple incremental backup approach is to use rsync to sync your files to a backup destination and then hard link the backup to a copy via cp -al so that you have historical snapshots.
It works as follows:
rm -rf mirror.2
mv mirror.1 mirror.2
cp -al mirror mirror.1
rsync -a --delete source/ mirror/
Or apparently you can use rsync’s --link-dest option to do the hard linking (instead of cp -al).
This works just fine if you assume that the contents of each file is always correct. You will have “mirrors” of your source, with any files that were deleted in ‘mirror’ preserved in ‘mirror.1’ and any files that were deleted in ‘mirror.1’ preserved in ‘mirror.2’.
The problem
The problem is what happens when you (or an application) accidentally screw up the contents of a file. In this case, all of the hard-linked files will also change, because a hard link is just a pointer to some stored data, it doesn’t duplicate the data. This means that ‘mirror’, ‘mirror.1’ and ‘mirror.2’ will all have the same screwed up file.
This means hard linking is not a good solution for incremental backups.
