Creating a poor man's incremental remote backup

In this recipe, we will learn about creating backups and incremental backups. We will write a script to get incremental backups.

Getting ready

Besides having a Terminal open, we need to remember a few concepts:

• Basic knowledge of the tar, gunzip, and gzip commands.
• Ensure that you have the necessary directories present in your system.

How to do it…

1. First, select a directory whose backup you want to take. We will use the tar command. Let's assume that you want to take backup of your /work directory:

$ tar cvfz work.tar.gz /work

2. Now, we will write a script to take an incremental backup. Create a incr_backup.shscript and write the following code in it:

#!/bin/bash
gunzip /work/tar.gz
tar uvf /work.tar /work/
gzip /work.tar

 

 

 

 

How it works…

Now, we will learn about the options used in the preceding command as well as the script:

1. In the command, the options we have used are these:
   1. c: This option will create an archive
   2. v: This option is for verbose mode. We...