I recently needed to come up with a quick and easy and hopefully elegant way to keep incremental rotating backups of the code I was working on. After a little research and testing I came up with the following bash script. The magic in this is taking advantage of rsync’s link-dest option. The link-dest option allows you to specify a folder to hard link. This means that when you rsync it only pulls the difference between the link-dest version and the latest version of the code. Thus you will only ever take up disk space equal to a copy of your code plus a weeks worth of changes(diffs) instead of eight copies of your code. When you combine this with a simple rotating directory structure you have a pretty quick and easy incremental rotating backup solution.

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