Install rdiff-backup on CentOS 6.5

Rdiff-backup is a great tool for incremental backups. After the initial run it will only backup the changes which is great to take off load from the server for backups.

To install issue the following command at shell as root:

wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup-1.2.8-4.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rdiff-backup*.rpm

The syntax is pretty straight forward.

rdiff-backup --exclude <PATH1> --exclude <PATH2> --verbosity 5 <SOURCE_FOLDER> <DESTINATION_FOLDER>

The command above is what I use for my client’s servers. You invoke the command by starting off with rdiff-backup followed by absolute paths of folders you want to exclude from the source path. –verbosity 5  outputs all what rdiff-backup is doing. And finally you define the source path and the destination path.

One limitation that I’ve come across is that rdiff-backup doesn’t do well with a large number of files. I’ve usually had to break down the backup into smaller tasks to get it done.