Apt-get install rsnapshot

Edit the rsnapshot.conf file -> vim /etc/rsnapshot.conf

If you do the install from the rsnapshot site instead of from the aptitude repository for debian then the default location for rsnapshot.conf is /usr/local/etc/rsnapshot.conf

Set the snapshot root directory -> (this is the directory where the revisioned backups will be stored to)

If this directory doesn’t already exist, you will need to create it.

Set the intervals (really, this just controls how many sets of backups will be retained before being overwritten by the next one. For example, if you set the weekly interval to “3″ as below, then that means once you reach “weekly.2″ in /backup then it will start over with weekly.0 again. Notice that the newest ones are always kept in the [hourly/daily/weekly].0 folder.

Cron is what controls the actual timing of the backups and ensures that they are done on the hour, daily, or weekly.

Go to /etc/cron.[hourly/daily/weekly] and create a file named rsnapshot[hourly/daily/weekly] corresponding to each matching folder.

Contents of files: ( [ … ] represents a set of options. It means that you create 3 different files and in each of those files you have just one of the [ ] options, correspondingly.

#!/bin/sh
#
# rsnapshot cron [hourly/daily/weekly]
rsnapshot [hourly/daily/weekly]

Then you need to be sure to make the newly created bash scripts executable using the following:

chmod u+x rsnapshot… (whatever the filename is)

Test it by running “rsnapshot configtest”

Tags: backup, linux, rsnapshot, versioning