Currently, I have a separate partition for `/home`, and I allow Timeshift to store snapshots there. I have external media, but they're rarely connected - so they wouldn't be suitable targets for Timeshift's normal operation.
I had the thought that from time to time it would be a good idea to back up my Timeshift snapshots explicitly on another physical drive. Naively, I tried running BiT as root (since the `timeshift` folder is owned by root), and setting up a profile to back up `/home/timeshift`, with no exclusions (reasoning that everything in there is there for a reason and might be needed if it were used for a system restore). I pretty promptly ran into the issue described in https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1003, which surprised me because if the log file is in `/root/.local` then it should be underneath `/home/timeshift`. But I guess that the snapshot contains symlinks to things in the running system and rsync tries to follow those. More worryingly, *the drive was still active* after I received the error message in the terminal (and the GUI stopped updating, and a "failed" marker file appeared in the backup folder). It was still active for several seconds after I quit BiT. (Fortunately this was on a new drive with tons of room, so no risk of exhausting the disk.) I also found https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1583 which makes it sound like maybe this isn't supposed to be possible, if people are arguing to exclude "snapshots" by default.... Is backing up `/timeshift` folders a supported use case? Are specific file-pattern exclusions necessary; and wouldn't they cause a problem with restoring from the backup (or rsyncing back to the original snapshot folder)? Would it have actually worked despite the one error message, such that I should have just let it run (it seems like rsyncing literally millions of files, most of them being hard links, would have been rather slow)? Are symlinks a problem, and if so how would I work around it? Karl Knechtel {:> _______________________________________________ Bit-dev mailing list -- bit-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to bit-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/bit-dev.python.org/ Member address: arch...@mail-archive.com
