Study Guide: rdiff-backup for Mac users
Uses
Mac Time Machine is easy to set up and use, but it offers few options, can become corrupted without notice, and takes up a lot of space.
One alternative is rdiff-backup, a Python shell script created over decades ago, and still very much alive today. It is used to manage incremental backups on *NIX machines. Now that macOS is *NIX under the hood, Mac users can take advantage of this classic script.
It is easily installed using Homebrew:
brew install rdiff-backup
A few simple examples
Backup to a local directory: Backup local directory foo to local directory bar. bar will end up a copy of foo, except that it will contain the directory foo/rdiff-backup-data, which will allow rdiff-backup to restore previous states.
rdiff-backup foo bar
rdiff-backup backup foo bar
Backup to a remote directory: Backup directory /some/local-dir to the directory /whatever/remote-dir on the machine hostname.net. rdiff-backup uses ssh to open the necessary pipe to the remote copy.
rdiff-backup /some/local-dir hostname.net::/whatever/remote-dir
rdiff-backup backup /some/local-dir hostname.net::/whatever/remote-dir
More information
- https://rdiff-backup.net/
- https://rdiff-backup.net/#user_documentation
- https://www.carloscaballero.io/backup-using-rdiff-backup/