Beware rdiff-backup. It certainly does turn rsync (not a backup program) into a backup program.
However, I used rdiff-backup in the past and it can be a bit problematic. If I remember correctly, every “snapshot” you keep in rdiff-backup uses as many inodes as the thing you are backing up. (Because every “file” in the snapshot is either a file or a hard link to an identical version of that file in another snapshot.) So this can be a problem if you store many snapshots of many files.
But it does make rsync a backup solution; a snapshot or a redundant copy is very useful, but it’s not a backup.
(OTOH, rsync is still wonderful for large transfers.)
melfie@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
Having a synced copy elsewhere is not an adequate backup and snapshots are pretty important. I recently had RAM go bad and my most recent backups had corrupt data, but having previous snapshots saved the day.
melfie@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
Don’t understand the downvotes. This is the type of lesson people have learned from losing data and no sense in learning it the hard way yourself.
tomenzgg@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
How would you pin down something like this? If it happened to me, I expect I just wouldn’t understand what’s going on.
melfie@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
I originally thought it was one of my drives in my RAID0 array that was failing, but I noticed copying data was yielding btrfs corruption errors on both drives and I was also getting btrfs corruption errors on the root volume as well. I figured it would be quite an odd coincidence if my main SSD and 2 hard disks all went bad and I happened upon an article talking about how corrupt data can also occur if the RAM is bad. So, I installed and booted into Memtester86+ and it immediately started showing errors on the single 16Gi stick I was using. I happened to have a spare stick that was a different brand, and that one passed the memory test with flying colors. After that, all the corruption errors went away and everything has been working perfectly ever since.
I will also say that another file system like ext4 wouldn’t even complain about corrupt data. I originally had ext4 on my main drive and at one point thought my OS install went bad, so I reinstalled with btrfs on top of LUKS and saw I was getting corruption errors on the main drive at that point, so it occurred to me that 3 different drives could not have possibly had a hardware failure and something else must be going on.