SquashFu - An incremental backup utility

falconindy · 2010-01-13 04:42:42

About a week ago, I deemed my now former backup solution to be old and busted. It didn't do compression, and it didn't do incrementals. Once or twice I found myself hurrying to fix something before my backup fired off at 2am (yes yes I could have stopped that).

Say herro to SquashFu. Written entirely in Bash, it uses squashfs, aufs, and rsync to create and manage incrementals while maintaining a decent level of compression on the base backup. The number of incrementals kept is user defined and can be changed freely. A minimum number of incrementals is also defined by the user. This number is referenced when the max is exceeded and SquashFu recreates the base backup, merging in enough of the oldest incrementals to bring you down to this minimum level.

Rolling back is easy. Because each backup is stored separately, you just need to specify how many you want to "peel off", and SquashFu creates a mount that represents that point in time. Simple! A query/reporting option decodes when backups were made to help decision making.

I deem it to be beta quality currently. It doesn't have all the options I'd like it to have just yet, but the major components are set in stone and will not change (i.e. 6 months from now this util will work on incrementals created today). Bug reports and minor feature requests are welcome.

PKGBUILD
GitHub page (with more detailed doc)

mikesd · 2010-01-13 08:41:55

This looks interesting. Fairly happy with my backup system however I think I will look at this once I get my head around exactly how it works. Good documentation.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-13 04:42:42

SquashFu - An incremental backup utility

#2 2010-01-13 08:41:55

Re: SquashFu - An incremental backup utility

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