Chapter 8. Filesystem Backup

There are many solutions that provide filesystem backup capabilities. These include everything from apps such as Dropbox, Box, Carbonite to hardware solutions such as Apple's Time Machine, Seagate, or network-attached storage products, to name a few. Most consumer tools provide some key automatic functionality, along with an app or website for you to manage your policies and content. Often, especially for developers, these tools don't quite do the things we need them to. However, thanks to Go's standard library (that includes packages such as ioutil and os) we have everything we need to build a backup solution that behaves exactly as we need it to.

For our final project, we will build a simple filesystem backup for our source code projects that archive specified folders and save a snapshot of them every time we make a change. The change could be when we tweak a file and save it, or if we add new files and folders, or even if we delete a file. We want to be able...