Snapshotter provides a simple, configuration-free snapshotter SRC DEST
command that makes incremental, snapshot backups of directories. It uses rsync
to do the actual copying and has high test coverage.
rsync and Python 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5.
sudo pip install snapshotter
To upgrade to a newer version of Snapshotter do:
sudo pip install --upgrade snapshotter
To see what version of Snapshotter you currently have installed do:
pip freeze | grep snapshotter
To backup a local source directory to a local target directory:
snapshotter /path/to/source/dir/to/backup /path/to/backup/destination
To backup a remote directory to a local directory:
snapshotter you@yourdomain.org:/path/to/source /path/to/backup/destination
To backup a local directory to a remote directory:
snapshotter /path/to/source you@yourdomain.org:/path/to/snapshots
See man rsync
for complete documentation of the syntax for specifying local
and remote paths.
You don't need to worry about whether local or remote source or destination
paths have a trailing /
or not - Snapshotter will do the right thing.
Each time you want to make another backup just run the same snapshotter command again. Snapshotter will create snapshots like this in the destination directory:
/path/to/backup/destination/
latest.snapshot/
2011-04-03T23_55_37.snapshot/
2011-03-03T23_36_50.snapshot/
2011-02-03T23_35_13.snapshot/
latest.snapshot
is a symlink to the most recent snapshot directory, in this
case 2011-04-03T23_55_37.snapshot
.
Each snapshot directory contains a complete copy of the source directory, but any files that had not changed since the previous snapshot are hard linked to their corresponding files in the previous snapshot. This means that:
-
The amount of new disk space used by each new snapshot is only equal to the size of the files that have changed or are new since the last snapshot.
-
The amount of data transferred to make each new snapshot is only equal to the size of the files that have changed or are new since the last snapshot, compressed.
-
Old snapshots can be deleted without harming new snapshots at all - each snapshot is an independent complete copy.
(But don't modify files in snapshots, not even their metadata such as permissions, as this will also modify the file in any other snapshots that have hardlinks to it.)
Backups don't cross filesystem boundaries. For each mount-point encountered in
the source directory there'll be just an empty directory in the snapshot.
This means you can backup your entire filesystem to an external drive with a
command like sudo snapshotter / /media/SNAPSHOTS
and it won't try to
recursively backup /media/SNAPSHOTS
into /media/SNAPSHOTS
.
If symlinks are encountered in the source directory the symlinks themselves are copied to the snapshot, not the files or directories that the symlinks refer to.
To restore selected files just copy them back from a snapshot directory to the live system. To restore an entire snapshot just copy the entire snapshot directory back to the live system.
If a snapshotter
command is interrupted for any reason (e.g. you Ctrl-c
it)
just run the same command again to resume making the snapshot where you left
off.
Snapshots are written to an incomplete.snapshot
directory in the destination
directory first and then moved to a YYYY-MM-DDTHH_MM_SS.snapshot
directory
when complete. If a snapshot is interrupted the incomplete.snapshot
directory
will be left behind and used to resume the snapshot if you run it again.
You can put your computer to sleep automatically after a backup finishes simply by chaining two commands in a shell:
snapshotter [OPTIONS] <SRC> <DST>; suspend
Where suspend
is a script on your PATH
that suspends your computer without
requiring sudo powers. On Ubuntu 14.04 this works for me:
#!/bin/sh -e
dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
To do a dry-run (just print out what would be done, but don't actually copy any files) do:
snapshotter --dry-run SRC DEST
Snapshotter automatically deletes your oldest snapshots when necessary to make
space for a new snapshot. By default it will always keep at least 3 snapshots.
To change this number use the --min-snapshots
argument:
snapshotter --min-snapshots 10 SRC DEST
You can pass any rsync options to snapshotter and it will pass them on to rsync. For example:
snapshotter --exclude='*~' SRC DEST
See man rsync
for all the available options.
For complete documentation of Snapshotter's command-line interface run:
snapshotter -h
Snapshotter is inspired by Michael Jakl's "Time Machine for every Unix out there":
http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html
http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_addendum.yaml.html