{
 "id": 39598,
 "slug": "rsync-backup-rotation-daily-weekly-monthly-archives",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/rsync-backup-rotation-daily-weekly-monthly-archives/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "rsync Backup Rotation — Daily, Weekly, Monthly Archives",
 "subtitle": "A practical rsync backup scheme with incremental transfers and automatic rotation.",
 "summary": "rsync is the most reliable backup tool on Linux — but setting up a proper rotation scheme takes thought. Here's a practical approach to daily, weekly, and monthly backups with incremental transfers that only copy what changed.",
 "topics": [
  "cloud",
  "linux",
  "server"
 ],
 "created": "2026-04-03T19:31:10.612000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-04-03T20:17:09.543000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2020-10-30_how-to-use-rsync-to-make-backups/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "How do you set up daily, weekly and monthly rsync backups?",
 "text": "The key to a good backup strategy is rotation: keeping recent backups for quick recovery, older ones for longer-term safety, and automatically removing the oldest to save space.\nA practical scheme:\n- Daily backups — keep the last 7 days\n- Weekly backups — keep the last 4 weeks\n- Monthly backups — keep the last 12 months\nUsing rsync's `--link-dest` option, each backup only stores the files that changed since the last run. Unchanged files are hard-linked to the previous backup, using almost no extra disk space. This means you can keep months of daily backups without needing terabytes of storage.\nAutomate it with a cron job, and you have a backup system that runs silently, efficiently, and never forgets.\nFrom Willem's complete guide to self-hosting your own infrastructure.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/rsync-backup-rotation-daily-weekly-monthly-archives/snippet.md"
}