Getting Started

Let's make your first backup.
Imagine you want to backup your home directory to /tmp/my_master_backup. (If your home directory is too big to do this, choose a small directory inside your home directory.)
Go into your home directory and type:

$ mkdir /tmp/my_master_backup
$ cd
$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_master_backup

Alternatively, you can call storeBackup.pl with an additional option:

$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_backup_destination --checkCompr

The Option --checkCompr will tell storeBackup.pl to check the contents of each file for compressibility. Without this option, storeBackup.pl will use static lists of file types to make a decision - which is much less precise (in chapter ``How to define if a file should be compressed'' you will get a more detailed view on this).

If storeBackup.pl is not in your path, you will get an error message from the shell and need to set $PATH or type the full path to storeBackup.pl.³
This can take some time depending on how much data is in your home directory, as storeBackup.pl will compress your files. It will use all cores of your system for this. Because of these compressions, the first backup is very slow.
If you want to reduce the load from storeBackup (especially in the first run), you might use option -compress 'nice bzip2' and maybe call storeBackup.pl with ionice -t -c 3 storeBackup.pl.

After the backup is finished, create a new file, copy a file and rename a file and or directory and start a second run:

$ cd
$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_master_backup

or

$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_backup_destination --checkCompr

You will notice that the backup is much faster now.

Hint: You can use the short form of the options, too:

$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_backup_destination --checkCompr

This is identical with:

$ storeBackup.pl -s . -b /tmp/my_backup_destination -C

Go to /tmp/my_master_backup. We call this location your ``master backup'' for consistency with the rest of the documentation. There you will find a directory named default. This is called a series because this directory will hold a series of backups for your computer. You can change the default series name from "default" to the name of your computer. This is easily accomplished with the storeBackup configuration file (explained later).

Inside of the default directory you will see two sub directories whose names reflect the date and time of the two backups you just completed. Go into these directories (use two shells, one for each) and look at the files with the command:
$ ls -li
Option ``i'' tells ls to show the inode number, which you can see in the very left column. You will notice that files with the same content (especially the ones you copied, renamed, moved and the ones in renamed directories) refer to the same inode - so the file exists only once on your disk thanks to storeBackup's efficient technology.

If you used storeBackup in Versions prior to 2.0 and simply made a backup with

storeBackup.pl -s sourceDir -t targetDir    # !!! old syntax !!!

and now want to continue making backups with version 2.0 or above, use

storeBackup.pl -s sourceDir --backupDir targetDir -S .

Where the parameters of sourceDir and targetDir are the same in both versions.