How to backup a folder with cloud like storage but offline?

Question

I have a shared drive which is formatted as ntfs. When booting Windows 10 and Linux Ubuntu, the drive mounds and I can read and write to it. The shared drive (s/:) is a third partition of the SSD.

This shared partition contains all of the files I created myself, and use day to day. These files are critical.

I am looking for a software that does the following:

1. Connect external drive to pc
2. Load up the software
3. Select the external drive partition I want files to be backed up to as output
4. Select the internal drive shared s:/ drive as the input
5. Press go

When I press go, I would like for a scan to begin. This scan will determine the tree and diff differences between the input and output. If the input has been updated to the output before, then only files falling in one of the two categories is backed up:

• If a file has been modified since the last backup
• If a file did not exist during the last backup

If this is not the correct place to post this, please let me know. Thank you for your time.

TLDR; Looking for software to backup files in folders which will exclude backing up unmodified files since the last backup. Essentially what Dropbox does, but rather than go to cloud, go to an external drive when connected.

Answer 1

You can use the famous rsync. Read rsync - Community Help Wiki.

Example:

rsync --stats --delete -avzh /source/dir /dest/dir

Be aware of the --delete option matching mirroring needs (not archiving).

For syncing to/from a cloud storage, see https://rclone.org/