Stephen, Thanks for the reply. I've just looked at rsnapshot and it looks good. I might give it a try. I think I'll steal your idea of "hourly backups to a local disk, and daily backups to a remote server via rsync over ssh" If you have a script you don't mind sharing shoot it over to me either off list if you like. ==== bruce On February 29, 2016 01:51:27 PM Stephen Gregory wrote: > > On 16-02-28 09:10 PM, Bruce Harding wrote: > >> The home server houses a photo gallery with 13000 pictures and a blog. > >> Should the number of files have any bearing on the choice of backup? > > Your choice in backup should be based on ease of use and reliability > first. Ease of use so that you use it. Reliability for obvious > reasons. Any half reasonable system should be able to handle that > number of files. > > I would recommend rsnapshot which is a wrapper around rsync. I have > used rsync in production for backups for a while. Some years ago I > switched from my hacked up rsync script to rsnapshot. Rsnapshot makes > light weight full backups. On my workstation I use rsnapshot to make > hourly backups to a local disk, and daily backups to a remote server > via rsync over ssh.