I’ve updated the system backup script I’ve released 3 weeks ago to let it clean automatically rdiff-backup folders. This is mandatory because incremental backup process is transactionnal and a power failure or a reboot can break the consistency of the rdiff-backup data repository. So even if such a misfortune happened, the script will be able to revert backups to a previously consistent state.

I’ve also added a locking mechanism to prevent the script to be run twice on the same machine. I’ve added this feature because I start my script every day thanks to cron and some backups can take more than one day.

Finally, all rsync commands will now be run first to reduce the time-window during which all external machines are reached and, as mentionned above, because rdiff-backup can take lots of time to finish its job.

Here is a direct link to the new version of the script. You can also find it in my page dedicated to various linux scripts.