How to make and restore incremental snapshots of hard disk
- by brunopereira81
I use Virtual Box a lot for distro / applications testing purposes.
One of the features I simply love about it is virtual machines snapshots, its saves a state of a virtual machine and is able to restore it to its former glory if something you did went wrong without any problems and without consuming your all hard disk space.
On my live systems I know how to create a 1:1 image of the file system but all the solutions I'v known will create a new image of the complete file system.
Are there any programs / file systems that are capable of taking a snapshot of a current file system, save it on another location but instead of making a complete new image it creates incremental backups?
To easy describe what I want, it should be as dd images of a file system, but instead of only a full backup it would also create incremental.
I am not looking for clonezilla, etc. It should run within the system itself with no (or almost none) intervention from the user, but contain all the data of the file systems. I am also not looking for a duplicity backup your all system excluding some folders script + dd to save your mbr. I can do that myself, looking for extra finesse.
I'm looking for something I can do before doing massive changes to a system and then if something when wrong or I burned my hard disk after spilling coffee on it I can just boot from a liveCD and restore a working snapshot to a hard disk.
It does not need to be daily, it doesn't even need a schedule. Just run once in a while and let it its job and preferably RAW based not file copy based.
