Tbku

Tool For Incremental And Imaging Backups

‘tbku’ is a utility script for producing “tarball” backups of some- or all of your files. It is useful both for producing incremental backups or for systemwide images or “snapshots”. The script can be run either from the command line or, more typically, as a cron job to automate system backup tasks.

The central benefit of using ‘tbku’ over hand written tar commands is that ‘tbku’ is “table driven”. You specify the set of files to back up in a table a separate file. You can have as many of these “filesets” as you wish, corresponding to different kinds of backups you want done. ‘tbku’ will do backups automatically or manually, based on the name of the “fileset”. This considerably simplifies automating backups, keeping backup logs, and generally maintaining an orderly backup environment.

‘tbku’ can also be used to capture system images which can then later be used to reprovision other machines.