How to take backup and incremental backup using Linux shell script

How can I take back up of a directory and update the changes(Incremental backup) to it.

Step1: Suppose you want to take backup of /home directory. Use tar(Tape ARchive) command  to do this as below

cd /

tar cvfz home.tar.gz /home

The options used here are

c --For creating the archive

v --For verbose mode, so that you can see what files are archiving

f --To take back to a file called home.tar.gz insted of tap drive

z --To compress it with Gzip

Step2: Once the first backup is completed update only changes to the archive by using below script

#!/bin/bash

gunzip /home/tar.gz

tar uvf /home.tar /home/

gzip /home.tar

Save this file and exit

The options used here are

u --For updating the archive with only new and updated files only

v --For verbose mode, so that you can see what files are archiving

f --To take back to a file called home.tar.gz instead of tap drive

First the script will unzip the archive file then it will update the archive with new and updated files from /home directory. Then once again gzip is used to compress this. 

Note: We can not update tar archive when it is compressed so we first uncompressed then only we updated the archive file.

Step3: Enter the crontab for this script to run at 3 AM on every day.

00 3 * * * /bin/bash /path/to/script

For more information on CRONTAB configuration Click here and for issues here. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to get updates on shell scripting.