Differential Backups using Git Bundles

There are a lot of self-hosted file and data backup solutions out there, most of which are clunky to set up and configure correctly. Many simply tar your whole directory and let you download a huge archive. Others will store snapshots “in the cloud”.

I like minimal, self-contained solutions. One excellent tool is, of course, rsync, which offers incremental file transfers, which is pretty neat, and saves space by only saving changed files from last checkpoint. This type of backup is usually referred to as incremental backsup. For your media collection or user file uploads this is great. But space can be saved even more if most of the changes are inside the files. This is where differential backup comes in. rsync doesn’t do differential backups. Moreover, there seems to be no straightforward access to history, diffs, etc.

Differential Backups using Git

“history”? “diffs”? Sounds like version control…

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