Is there a working Linux backup solution that uses inotify?

Solution 1:

I answered my own question with "yum search inotify". It's called lsyncd and it's hosted on google code.

Unfortunately it looks like it always runs a full rsync first, so it still wouldn't help me if my computer was not turned on for more than 14 hours at a time.

Lsyncd uses rsync to synchronize local directories with a remote machine running rsyncd. Lsyncd watches multiple directories trees through inotify. The first step after adding the watches is to rsync all directories with the remote host, and then sync single file by collecting the inotify events. So lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution that should be easy to install and use while blending well with your system. See lsyncd --help for detailed command line options.

Solution 2:

There's a new system called fsnotify that's designed to solve the deficiencies of inotify which was introduced to solve the problems of dnotify. fsnotify lets you watch an entire filesystem without much fuss. Hopefully fsnotify will help solve all our future Linux backup problems.

Solution 3:

You can hack something with incron.

 /path1    IN_CLOSE_WRITE     rsync  -au $@/$#  backuphhost:/path

Solution 4:

Based on research (not testing) it seems like inotify can't handle the very large number of files on most systems and/or is very slow doing so. The thread at http://www.pubbs.net/kernel/200905/109416/ was the most useful, It pointed to a new linux feature that seems to be in or headed towards mainline, fsnotify, that is in linux 2.6.31 and later.