Ask Slashdot: Asynchronous RAID-1 Free Software Backup For Laptops?

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 25, 2013 @05:11AM from the just-the-changes-ma'am-just-the-changes dept.

First time accepted submitter ormembar writes "I have a laptop with a 1 TB hard disk. I use rsync to perform my backups (hopefully quite regularly) on an external 1 TB hard disk. But, with such a large hard disk, it takes quite some time to perform backups because rsync scans the whole disk for updates (15 minutes in average). Does it exist somewhere a kind of asynchronous RAID-1 free software that would record in a journal all the changes that I perform on the disk and replay this journal later, when I plug my external hard disk on the laptop? I guess that it would be faster than usual backup solutions (rsync, unison, you name it) that scan the whole partitions every time. Do you feel the same annoyance when backing up laptops?"

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Time Machine by Roger+W+Moore · 2013-07-25 05:16 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Time Machine on a Mac laptop does exactly this - it uses a journal of filesystem changes to update only the files it needs to. While this is probably not much use to you since I'm guessing that if you had a Mac you would not be asking this question it would be a system to look at if there is no FOSS alternative and you want to code your own.