A while ago, I blogged about my self-made backup solution, a simple shell script using rsync to create snapshot backups. This wasn't my first attempt at establishing backups for my private workstation but the most successful one so far. The backup takes less than 5 minutes for about 10 GB of data in my home directory. It's a quick and painless process, and a repeating appointment in my calendar reminds me not to forget it.

A friend of mine (hey Mike!) liked the idea, bought an external USB drive and started to use the script, too. Being an experienced Unix user and hacker, he sensed room for improvement and we tweaked the script to handle errors more gracefully and to provide better diagnostics in case things go wrong. The script has about tripled in size since its original release, but with its 80 lines and comprehensive comments it's still easy to extend and understand. Thanks a lot, Mike!

You can get the script and the rsync filter file from Github.