Backup

Rsync

rsync -aAXv /* /path/to/backup/folder --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found,/home/*/.gvfs}
  arch based

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.
- man, readme, examples, wiki
- sync and rdiff-backup do not share any code, but rdiff-backup uses the rsync algorithm
- http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

rsnapshot - Local filesystem snapshots are handled with rsync. Secure remote connections are handled with rsync over ssh, while anonymous rsync connections simply use an rsync server. Both remote and local transfers depend on rsync. rsnapshot saves much more disk space than you might imagine. The amount of space required is roughly the size of one full backup, plus a copy of each additional file that is changed. rsnapshot makes extensive use of hard links, so if the file doesn't change, the next snapshot is simply a hard link to the exact same file.
- http://how-to.linuxcareer.com/guide-to-rsnapshot-and-incremental-backups-on-linux
- http://serverfault.com/a/136878/130150

http://duplicity.nongnu.org - Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.

Areca Backup is a personal file backup software developed in Java.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areca_Backup

Disk ARchive is a shell command that backs up directory trees and files, taking care of hard links, Extended Attributes, sparse files, MacOS's file forks, any inode type (including Solaris Door inodes), etc.

backup2l - low-maintenance backup/restore tool. backup2l is a lightweight command line tool for generating, maintaining and restoring backups on a mountable file system (e. g. hard disk). The main design goals are are low maintenance effort, efficiency, transparency and robustness. In a default installation, backups are created autonomously by a cron script. supports hierarchical differential backups with a user-specified number of levels and backups per level. With this scheme, the total number of archives that have to be stored only increases logarithmically with the number of differential backups since the last full backup. Hence, small incremental backups can be generated at short intervals while time- and space-consuming full backups are only sparsely needed.

Obnam is an easy, secure backup program. Snapshot backups. Every generation looks like a complete snapshot, so you don't need to care about full versus incremental backups, or rotate real or virtual tapes. Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations. If the backup repository already contains a particular chunk of data, it will be re-used, even if it was in another file in an older backup generation. This way, you don't need to worry about moving around large files, or modifying them. Encrypted backups, using GnuPG.

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup solution that allows the IT administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media. Amanda uses native utilities and formats (e.g. dump and/or GNU tar) and can back up a large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux or Unix. Amanda uses a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers.
- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Main_Page