dss is known to compile on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. However, it is run-tested only on Linux. Note that [lopsub](http://people.tuebingen.mpg.de/maan/lopsub) is required to compile dss. Type make in the dss source directory to build the dss executable and the man page. If lopsub is installed in a non-standard path, you may need to run `make` as follows: make CPPFLAGS=-I$HOME/lopsub/include LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/lopsub/lib Then type sudo make install to install in /usr/local, or make install PREFIX=/somewhere/else to install in /somewhere/else. Also make sure that [rsync](https://rsync.samba.org/) is installed on your system. Version 2.6.1 or newer is required. Examples: --------- Suppose you'd like to create snapshots of the existing directory /foo/bar in the directory /baz/qux. Create the config file ~/.dssrc that contains the values for the source and the destination directories as follows: echo 'source-dir "/foo/bar"' > ~/.dssrc echo 'dest-dir "/baz/qux"' >> ~/.dssrc Then execute the commands mkdir /baz/qux dss run In order to print the list of all snapshots created so far, use dss ls Yes, it's really that easy. The second example involves a slightly more sophisticated config file. It instructs dss to exclude everything which matches at least one pattern of the given exclude file, prevents rsync from crossing file system boundaries and increases the number of snapshots. source-dir "/foo/bar" dest-dir "/baz/qux" # exclude files matching patterns in /etc/dss.exclude rsync-option "--exclude-from=/etc/dss.exclude" # don't cross filesystem boundaries rsync-option "--one-file-system" # maintain 2^6 - 1 = 63 snapshots num-intervals "6" The /etc/dss.exclude file could look like this (see rsync(1) for more examples) - /proc - /**/tmp/ Note that dss supports many more features and config options such as taking snapshots from remote hosts and several hooks that are executed on certain events, for example whenever a snapshot was created successfully. Try dss -h for an overview of all supported command line options or dss --detailed-help for the full help text.