Les Mikesell wrote:

Martin Fisher wrote:
Thank you for the various responses, and sorry to take up your time.

It is now clear that trying to use backuppc is not really appropriate in
this case.

It could be made to work, but probably not worth the effort unless you
intend to add other remote targets to back up later.

I have now looked at a whole range of things, and unfortunately there
does not seem to be a straightforward tool that I can use in Ubuntu with a GUI or web front end that will do what I want - automated incremental
and full backups to an external drive. I have tried a many things and
either I cannot understand how to use them or they simply don't actually work. I will therefore return to a manual system of occasionally writing
a zip archive of my home drive to the external drive. It works but is
tiresome and has a number of problems.

I'd do it this way, assuming your drives have enough space and are
linux-formatted.  Create a directory for every partition you want to
back up.  Then write a shell script that repeats this for each:

cd /partion_top  # examples / /boot
rsync --one-file-system -avH . /path/to/destination/directory

This will take a long time the first time you run it. Subsequent times
will be fast enough that you probably won't bother scheduling or
automating it - just run it in a window where it won't interfere with
anything else you are doing. Once you understand what it is doing, you
may want to ad the --delete option to remove files that have been
removed on the source and perhaps do something with the --backup-dir
option to keep some history of changing files.

You'll end up with a full copy of all your files in a form you can
simply copy back into place if you need them.

I'd say rdiff-backup is about as easy (the docs are very good, lots of examples) and that gives you the added advantage of having multiple incremental backups (like Time Machine).

Nils Breunese.

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