On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 10:00:32AM -0500, Jason wrote:
I use rsync for doing incremental backups to a USB stick. I am having a problem that rsync does not like backing up my mutt emails since they contain a colon in the filename. For example:1498570870.M370636P2743Q2R5bbb999d0aefc481.net1:2,S Using fat32 format on the USB stick may be part of the problem but I don't want to change to a different format for other reasons. What is the best way to backup these emails or how do others handle this?
Colons are illegal characters in a FAT filename. So you need a way around that. You could "mangle" the filenames (that is, transform them in a predictable manner), but you'd need to remember to 'unmangle' them when doing a restore. So another option is to bypass FAT and delegate the job of handling the files to another system. In other words, archive the files. TAR and CPIO are good candidates here (I'd favour CPIO in this case as I know it handles obscure cases best). However, you want to use rsync and that doesn't usually work with archive files. So, I'm going to suggest a third tool here: archivemount. archivemount is a "fuse" (filesystem in userspace). It opens an archive and presents it as a filesystem, mounted in a new directory. So, the idea would be, you create a small target archive (archivemount can add to existing archives, but it can't create them from scratch), archivemount that somewhere and then rsync between your mail folder and the mount point. This will funnel all the data into a single file on the USB drive. Unmounting the directory will close the file. Next time you want to back up, you archivemount the same file, rsync to the mount point and the changes will be applied. Magic.
Thanks for any help. -- Jason
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