I am backing up a few directories to the disk space I have with my provider. First I make a "tar" of the directory and sub-directories and then a "put" through "FTP".

This was ok for the first backup but is not efficient for subsequent backups since only parts of some files have changed and need to be backed up.

Could someone advise a suitable way of doing this and point me to or show suitable example of scripts. My experience with FTP or RSYNC is just basic.

Thank you for your help.

Hi

I think there are a number of ways of doing this. If you have ssh access to the computer that will hold the backups, I suggest you read a bit on rsync or rdiff-backup. The man pages have some examples you can use. "rdiff-backup" makes a differential backup so you can find files deleted a long time ago.

Alternatively, if you have some harddisk space on your local computer, you can use tar to make incremental backups, so that each new backup produces a separate tar file with only the new or changes files. Then you can put that new file to the backup server with ftp.

Best regards,
Guttorm.

Thank you, I'll try your suggestions.