I've taken over development of an embedded Linux product which needs a reliable backup solution. Backups are to be performed without compression to an attached USB storage device formatted to NTFS.
The current implementation is a simple rsync --archive --verbose --delete
which works, but given the --delete
parameter any accidentally deleted files will also be removed from the backup which is no good.
By not using --delete
on the other hand we may end up with duplicates if files get renamed.
Id like to switch this over to using hard-links to create snapshot-style backups as done by Mike Rubel, or http://webgnuru.com/linux/rsync_incremental.php, which basically comes down to:
rsync -avh --delete --link-dest=<previous-backup> <source> <backup-location>
I haven't seen any explicit mentions of file systems for this. I know that I can do this on NTFS but are there any hickups? will backups created this way be readable as expected on OSX and windows?