Now that we can take advantage of rsync to minimize the data to transfer when backup. But it's still a little uncomfortable if we need to do this manually everyday, right? Well, cron is here to solve the pain.

Recently I do most of my work on a remote data center through a slow network connection (<100KB/sec). I usually backup my project source tree as follows. I first do make clean and also delete any unnecessary obj files to shrink the total file size, then I compress the whole source tree as a tar ball and then I use scp locally to fetch the backup tar ball to my local machine. The procedure is quite boring since I need to do this every day before I go home, otherwise the whole bandwidth will be occupied for near an hour during which I can almost do nothing.

Situation gets better when I find rsync and cron. Here is how I do automatic regular (daily) backup with them.