rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup

Health v2 · maintenance only

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1263 stars · 98 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

rdiff-backup is a Python-based command-line backup tool that mirrors one directory to another, locally or over SSH, while storing reverse diffs so older file versions can be recovered. It combines the simplicity of a mirror with incremental backup history and preserves metadata like permissions, ACLs, hard links, and ownership.

Use cases

• back up a directory to an external or remote drive over ssh
• keep a mirror of a folder plus ability to restore old versions
• run scheduled incremental backups of a home directory
• efficiently back up only changed files over a slow network link
• restore a deleted or modified file from a previous backup
• back up Linux servers to remote storage preserving permissions and ACLs

When to choose

• you want mirror-like backups with point-in-time recovery in one tool
• you need bandwidth-efficient remote backups over SSH
• you need a cross-platform (Linux/macOS/Windows) scriptable backup CLI
• you want to preserve Unix metadata like hard links, ACLs, and uid/gid

When to avoid

• you need a GUI or web interface for backups
• you need deduplication, encryption, or cloud-object-storage targets out of the box
• you need block-level or full-disk imaging backups
• you prefer snapshot-based tools like borg, restic, or btrfs/zfs snapshots

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

backup cli file-system compression files developer-tools self-hosted windows cli python cross-platform incremental-backup reverse-diff rsync-like ssh-remote-backup mirror-plus-history automation linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup")