Creating a new snapshot by just adding or updating files to an existing one?

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@chressie, I have a similar use case: Copying the photos/videos of my Android phone (small disk) to my PC (larger disk) and than backing all that up (NAS).

Here is how I did it:

  1. I installed syncthing-android on the phone and syncthing on the PC. Both share the camera directory of the phone. On the PC the directory is $HOME/phone_sync When the phone gallery is cleared to make space, the photos and videos will be erased from the PC as well. Syncthing takes care of that. I clear the gallery about once a month manually or Google Photos app offers me to take care of it and removes anything that is older than 30 days.

  2. On the PC, I have a regular job (e.g. a cronjob, systemd-timer, etc.) every 60 minutes. That job executes rsync -rtP $HOME/phone_sync $HOME/Pictures/smartphone. Since rsync will not delete anything unless you also specify --delete the photos that are erased from the phone and hence erased from $HOME/phone_sync are STILL KEPT in $HOME/Pictures/smartphone. As you can see, photos and videos may exist twice under $HOME for a period of up to 30 days maximum. That’s fine for me.

  3. I use restic to backup $HOME to the NAS regularly.The deduplication of restic will ensure that each photo or video takes space in the NAS only once.

So, in summary, I use syncthing for transferring between devices, rsync for archiving, and restic for backups.

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