I’ve been messing around with rsync lately on one of my linux machines. I’ve been looking for a simple solution that would provide something similar to Apple’s Time Machine software. There are obviously some open source packages that could provide this functionality for me, but I just wanted something really simple that could be automated. I came up with a script which utilizes rsync and is automated with cron. This script will produce incremental backups between two local directories or between directories on remote servers. In essence I guess you could say that this script succeeds in mimicing the ‘core’ behavior of Apple’s Time Machine software for Mac OS X. Rsync is available on nearly all Unix-compatible operating systems (BSD, linux, solaris, etc.), it is easy to use, and can be automated via a combination of this script and cron.

Check out the full script and more information: Automatic Rsync Script