I used to do this to save the $6 and backup locally. Unfortunately, it stopped being practical once the backups hit 3-4 GB since they'd interfere with my internet access in the morning.
3-4 GB of data each day?
I backup data from my personal laptop to digitalocean droplet ($5 month) and then during the night backup droplet (which also stores my mail and other stuff) to the disc connected to raspi in my home. Incremental backup (rdiff-backup) takes literally 5 minutes (3 mins for /home and 2 mins for mail). And amount of data slowly approaches 9GB.
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3-4 GB of data each day?
I backup data from my personal laptop to digitalocean droplet ($5 month) and then during the night backup droplet (which also stores my mail and other stuff) to the disc connected to raspi in my home. Incremental backup (rdiff-backup) takes literally 5 minutes (3 mins for /home and 2 mins for mail). And amount of data slowly approaches 9GB.
The problem with incremental backups is that once data at the source gets corrupted, you lose it in both places.
Full backups are less efficient, but significantly safer.
It is just a snapshot of the entire database.