Creating an Incremental backup with Linux and pax archive tool
pax is an archive utility somewhere between cpio and tar. This is just because is independent of the specific archive format, and supports a wide variety of different archive formats. It can perform simple tasks as creating a compressed archive of a selected directory or it can as much easily create a daily incremental backups. In this short article we will see how to protect our daily work by creating an incremental backup with pax.
First we need to create a directory where we intend to store our daily backups. As a root user create a directory /usr/local/backup/lilo and make an user liloto be an owner:
# mkdir -p /usr/local/backup/lilo # chown lilo.lilo /usr/local/backup/lilo
At this point we are ready. Since we do not have any backup yet first we need to create a full backup. Switch back to a user lilo ( use your user name ) and execute:
$ pax -wvf /usr/local/backup/lilo/$(date +%Y%m%d) ~/
The command above will create a directory as a today's date and copy all of your data from your home directory to a new backup directory. The backup for today is done. Next day after work we create an incremental backup ( copy only new or changed files ) with a following command:
$ pax -T 0000 -wvf /usr/local/backup/lilo/$(date +%Y%m%d) ~/
Note that -T option will instruct a pax command to copy only files changed and created since last midnight. You can continue to do an incremental backup indefinitely. However, it is recommended to do a full back at least once a week or month, this depends on the nature of your work. You can also consider to use pax's -z option to create compressed archives if you are concerned about a disk space.
It is obvious that the backup example we have just shown, would not safe us from a hardware failure of our hard drive as we have only copied all data locally within a single file system. From this reason  consider to backup onto your USB removable media or using remotely using NFS and etc.
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