Getting Started

Let's make your first backup.
Let's imagine, you want to backup your home directory to /tmp/my_backup_destination. (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_backup_destination
$ cd
$ storeBackup.pl --sourceDir . --backupDir /tmp/my_backup_destination

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.²
Depending on how much data is in your home directory, this can take a while, because 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.

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_backup_destination

You will see, it's much faster now.

Go to /tmp/my_backup_destination. You will see a directory called default. This is called a series because this directory will hold a series of backups for your computer. You can easily 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. Check, 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 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.