Incremental Backup Orchestrator

Overview

Incremental Backup Orchestrator is a lightweight, production-oriented backup system designed for stateful workloads such as application servers, self-hosted services, and infrastructure nodes. It provides a reliable alternative to heavyweight backup platforms by combining proven Unix primitives—rsync, hardlinks, and file locking—into a deterministic and auditable workflow.

The system guarantees that every backup cycle produces a fully restorable current snapshot and optionally maintains hourly and daily point-in-time snapshots using hardlink-based deduplication for efficient storage utilization.

Key Capabilities

• Atomic backup commits — data is staged before becoming the live backup, preventing partial or corrupt states
• Incremental and space-efficient — unchanged files are hardlinked rather than duplicated
• Tiered snapshots — configurable hourly and daily retention windows
• Concurrency-safe — overlapping runs are prevented via lock files
• Operationally simple — deployable with cron or systemd and standard Linux tooling

Use Cases

This project is well-suited for:

• Application servers with frequently changing data
• Homelabs and small infrastructure clusters
• Consulting engagements requiring auditable, deterministic backups
• Compliance-oriented environments where restore integrity matters

Architecture Summary

Each backup run synchronizes data into a staging directory, commits it atomically into a current snapshot, and then derives time-based snapshot tiers from that committed state. This ensures that every restore point represents a complete, verified backup rather than a partial or in-progress copy.

Source Code

The full implementation, documentation, and operational guides are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/alexbakertech/incremental-backup-orchestrator

This repository includes deployment instructions, design rationale, and restore procedures suitable for production use.