Ghetto-timemachine Ruby Backup Script

I decided to try my hand at some Ruby scripting and figured, what better way than to port one of my existing Perl scripts.

The result is the Ruby ghetto-timemachine.rb backup script!

The code is maintained here:
https://github.com/flakrat/ghetto-timemachine

So, what does it do? In a nutshell, it performs daily backups using a combination of hard links and rsync that result in a Time Machine like backup that uses very little additional space beyond the initial backup and the size of any files that change.

Example usage:

• Local source to local destination with comma separated list of excludes

  
  ./ghetto-timemachine.rb --src ~/Pictures --dest /media/USB/backup --excludes \*.raw,\*.bmp
  

• Local source to remote destination

  
  ./ghetto-timemachine.rb --src ~/Pictures --dest flakrat@rathole:/backup --excludes \*.raw,\*.bmp
  

Nightly cron job running at 1:10AM

10 1 * * * /home/flakrat/bin/ghetto-timemachine.rb --src ~/Pictures --dest flakrat@rathole:/backup --excludes \*.raw,\*.bmp

See the README for a more detailed description of the backup and rotation process.