On Mon, 7 May 2018 09:59:01 -0400 Bob Weber <bobrwe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/7/18 9:28 AM, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Richard Owlett wrote: > >> My goal was to copy root and its sub-directory to a directory on > >> another physical device. > > Well understood. > > In a slightly different scenario (backup on Blu-ray) i do this > > several times per day. > > > > But i would not dare to give the whole root tree as input to any > > copying program or backup archiver. Not only because of the risk of > > stepping on my own foot but also because there are several trees > > which do not deserve backup or could even make trouble when being > > fully read. > > > > In my root directory that would be: /dev /mnt /proc /run /sys > > E.g. because of > > $ ls -l /proc/kcore > > -r-------- 1 root root 140737477877760 May 7 15:22 /proc/kcore > > > > (Somebody else shall try whether it's really readable and what > > comes out. The announced size is nearly 128 TiB.) > > > > > > Have a nice day :) > > > > Thomas > > > > > There is a program called rsnapshot that uses rsync for the actual > work of copying but has a config file where you can supply exclude > directories (like /media). I just run "rsnapshot hourly" to copy my > root file system before an apt upgrade command just in case a major > problem occurs with the update. The /proc /sys and /dev directories > are not copied since they are "mounted" system directories. > rsnapshot uses hard links between backups so only the changed files > are actually copied. The number of versions to keep is configured > in /etc/rsnapshot.conf. > > In using your cp command, rsync or rsnapshot it is very important > that the destination filesystem be able to handle hard links and all > the file attributes of a linux file system. So make sure that at > least there is an ext3 or ext4 type file system on the destination > drive. If you are not sure what file system is in use for the backup > destination just run the mount command (as root) without any > arguments and it will print out all the mounted file systems and > types. Another way to show fs type, without showing so much system stuff: $ lsblk -f This also shows labels (if any) and mount points. - Dan