This is the official website of snap2, an rsync-based backup program for Linux that can create and manage a series of rotating backup snapshots.  A backup snapshot is a full backup of your files as they were at a given point in time.  However, thanks to Linux hard links and the fact that rsync only has to transmit changes in files, these backups only take a small amount of disk space and bandwidth.

You can fit gigabytes of full backups on a one-gig USB flash drive, with no file compression!

This program is written in bash (Linux shell script) and used gtkdialog for the GUI.  There were other similar solutions available several years ago when I wrote the first version of this program, but none of them gave me all the features I wanted:

• GNU General Public license
• extremely fast "snapshot" backups of huge collections of files
• back up to 2nd hard drive, USB flash drive, or remote server
• can do simple (single copy) mirror backups
• can use "file exclusions" (files not to back up) for individual source paths
• can be run manually whenever you want a "snapshot" of the current state of your files.  Or it can be run automatically with a tool like cron.
• backups are accessible as regular files in regular directories.  No special software is needed to access the backups.  You can browse to a past version of a source code file and copy it back to your working directory, or recover entire directories.
• Thanks to hard link magic, even though backups appear to be completely separate copies, in reality only new/modified files create new copies on disk.  This gives huge economy of disk space.  You can get what appear to be several gigs of backups on a one-gig USB drive!
• it is not necessary to be root to backup your files.
• Report files are stored in the "root" of the backup. These will be compressed by gzip, if available on your system.
• support for backups to a remote server.
• support for more than one settings directory.  This allows backups of some directories to a remote server, and others to a local disk.
• Automatic Backup Scheduler
• Remote server SSH public key authentication setup

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