@Jeff,

Thank you for sharing your experience with `rsnapshot`. It’s great to see how simple and efficient it is for you. Your idea of event-based backups instead of time-based ones is excellent and could make it even better.

Hopefully, the community adds this feature in the future!

I’ve used rsnapshot for years. What’s super about it is that it does not require any GUI to be running, or, for that matter, any software at all, to recover. You simply mount the drive with the rsnapshot backups, and copy (or rsync) the stuff back to your newly-installed (or repaired) drive. Boom. Done. No GUI. No software. Just copy from the command line. (Technically, when restoring, I use this command line, which I have aliased to “rsrtp“:

sudo rsync -rt --stats --progress" /mnt/bak8TB/rsnap/alpha.0/localhost/home/ /home/

I have other stuff in there, too, such as /etc/, /root/, and /var/, but you get the idea.

rsnapshot gets the shortest review above.

It would also need the shortest review of restores: All it takes is copying back from the commandline.

I love that rsnapshot minimizes drive usage by intelligent use of hard links.

The only thing I would prefer to add to rsnapshot (or to have in any backup program, for that matter) would be to NOT make it time-based, anymore. (I.e., DONT have it run once an hour, once a day, etc. Instead, have it run ONLY when there is a change in a file. Then only THAT file has to be added to the backup.

rsnapshot would EASILY lend itself to that sort of setup, because of the hard links. I’d just love to see someone do it.

Thanks.

Regarding the correct name of “Back In Time,” we, as the new maintenance team (who took over in 2022), have decided to label it “Back In Time,” or abbreviated as “BIT.” Previously, the name was labeled inconsistently.