On 21 September 2017 at 09:46, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
I have my own incremental backup system which I use across several computers (desktop, two laptops and a Raspbery Pi). I wrote it myself because I was using rdiff-nackup and wanted to improve on that.
I think this or Steve/s approaches would be the ways to go it I wanted to do that kind of backup.
However, for my needs a dd-style backup is more appropriate (but slow, creates large files, etc, hence looking for better ways). As I mentioned in my last email, I think I badly described my needs in the OP (maybe backup/restore is better described in terms of disk imaging, albeit that actually imaging a disk is exactly what I'm trying to avoid).
My use case is more about setting one Pi up the way I like it and then creating a dozen clones of it, than it is about not losing the contents of the original Pi. (To be fair, that is a separate requirement so this has been a very useful discussion all the same.) Or it's about setting up a Pi the way I think I like it, then backing up the whole thing because I'm about to play with it and break it horribly or use it for some other purpose. (I tend to just swap uSD cards cards around but given they're too small to label that's not working out too well!)