rsnapshot vs rdiff-backup
Some time ago I was researching open source backup tools and the available solutions were narrowed down to rsnapshot and rdiff-backup. I did kind of a benchmarking between both solutions. I was (and still am) interested mainly in the performance aspect of the backup tool, which of the two was more efficient. I did some tests and the goal of this post is to share the result.
I wont be getting into the differences between them. There are lots of great articles online that already do that and also a great book by O’Reilly called “Backup and Reovery” that also convers both these solutions.
- http://rbackup.lescigales.org
- http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
- http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/02/backup-on-linux-rsnapshot-vs-rdiff/
The idea
Start with a 5Gb MySQL database that would grow between backups. Each growth would add random data to tables and new tables (new files). Rsnapshot would do new hourlys and rdiff-backup would do incremental backups once the first one was made. All backups would be run manually so that no simultaneous actions would happen.


It happened. After years of Debian and Ubuntu I changed my personal laptop’s Linux distribution to Fedora.

