On Thursday 26 July 2007 17:36, Col wrote: > Andrew Errington wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I am running MEPIS 6.5 with a KDE desktop. I am considering running Keep > > (the KDE backup thing) to do local time-series backups of my home > > directory (to guard against accidental deletions or edits) and then rsync > > to mirror everything from /home to an external USB drive periodically.
<snip> > > Hi Andy > > I have separate hard drive for data I want to keep. I rsync this drive > to a usb drive with the following command. > > $rsync -avz --delete --stats --progress /mnt/hdd/data/ \ /mnt/sdb1/backup > > The usb drive is encrypted with encfs which I leave off site. > <snip> > Beware, it pays to practice on some temp directory's first as it is very > easy to delete the wrong stuff. > > Hope that gives you some ideas. > Col. It's great! Here's what I've got: rsync -av --stats --progress --delete /home/ /media/sda1/backup/ Everything is in /home, so it gets all users' home directories (/home/username) and all my photos and mp3s (/home/data/photos and /home/data/mp3) I am not compressing the data, so the files on the USB drive are visible as ordinary files- nothing special is needed to get them back. I have not set up Keep yet, but that will simply create more files in my home directory, which will be copied by rsync. I am doing this operation as root, with nobody logged on to the laptop. Then I know that no files are open or otherwise being messed with. I still have to make a list of files that I *don't* want to back up, like a lot of the files beginning with '.', but that can be added later. I feel much happier that I finally have a sensible backup routine at home, rather than the ad-hoc methods I've employed so far. Thanks for all the tips- and anyone else that hasn't done this yet, think seriously about your backup regime (ah, the zeal of the newly-converted!). A
