On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 04:56:39PM +0100, Darac Marjal wrote: > 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.
I've been experimenting with tar. Let's say I decide to use tar and forget about using rsync for mails, what would be some good options to use to only update the archive with new files? I have tried: tar uGvf ~/Main/mail.tar /path/to/maildir but it seems every time it is run it just adds copies of everything to the archive again, instead of just what was added since last time. > > > > >Thanks for any help. > >-- > >Jason > > -- > For more information, please reread. Thank you. -- Jason
