Use rsync for backup without overwrite

Question

I know about --ignore-existing option and wonder if there's something slightly different.

My situation is: I have a webserver with large amount of user-uploaded pictures. It's about 2TB now. Usually these files are not modified at all. I use rsync and backup them to other server.

But what if some file becomes broken? Suppose, a half of a file disappeared. It will copied to backup and overwrites previous correct file, so backup becomes broken as well.

I may use --ignore-existing. But what if some file was still changed (that's very rarely but possible). With this option backup will not have this new file.

I would like to have all versions of a file on backup if it changes. Is it possible? That is: if rsync defines that file already exists, it moves existing old file to some ../previous-TIMESTAMP/oldFileHere and after that puts the new file on the place of an old one.

Is there a way to achieve this?

Answer 1

--backup --suffix=

If you don't want to use rsnapshot you can use destination files with suffixes like this:

rsync --backup --suffix=`date +'.%F_%H-%M'` ~/life_story.txt /media/myusername/backupdrive/life_story.txt

Note:

• The copies will be "smart" - if the source and the destination are the same, no new timestamped backup will be generated (which is good)
• There's an option to use a subdirectory instead of a file suffix (--backup-dir) but I haven't tried that myself.