I have been using a backup script which creates Mac Time Machine type backups (all be it without a GUI). It keeps yearly (for ever), monthly (for a year) and daily (for a month) backups. It uses hard links so the great thing is it dose not use lots of disk space (i.e. it never has to have two full backups at the same time).

For another client I wanted to do the same but am using a NFS mounted backup NAS. I should of realised this but it meant I cant use hard links.

I am using duplicity for now but I don't think it can allow me to keep yearly backups without using lots of space. Even doing a rolling 6 moths of backups would require doing a full backup every six months and using doable the disk space.

So if there a backup tool like rsync using hard links that achieves the same but works without hard links? Its for a server so if there was a GUI it would have to run on another machine.

Ben

Not a direct answer, but a pretty good list of backup tools are discussed at http://askubuntu.com/questions/2596/...f-backup-tools

I use rsnapshot from server side, this way it can use hard links.

Th point is I cant use hard links as it is backing up to NFS.

I think http://blog.bacula.org/ may be the only one that does what I want. going to investigate further.

I have a liking for "dirvish", it's old but stable and can cope with a variety of situations. I use that in combination with a HP tape libary and some bash scripting and it works quite well.

FYI: Proprietary format.

Yes, and my point was to back it up from server side over NFS so I still can use hard links.