I've been using rdiff-backup for 10+ years. I developed a simple bash
script that did what I wanted, and then I just ran it. My OS is and has
been Debian Stable.
My script
- checks to make sure I'm running as root (I forget why I did that 10+
years ago)
- for each of 4 rdiff-backup commands, it
- prints a header saying what is being backed up
- backs up /etc, /usr/local (probably intended to capture a GNU MCSim
custom installation; I should be able to rebuild that. This may be the
reason for running as root, too.)
- runs dpkg to get a list of installed packages
- backs up my /home with three exceptions
- backs up another /home from this machine
- prints a closing comment
Two things happened this summer: my backup disk failed :-(, and I realized
that Debian 9 was becoming untenable, so I upgraded to Debian 11.
I just got a new WD Blue 4T SATA HDD and installed it in a UGREEN
chassis. I plugged the drive into a USB 3.0 port. I then formatted the
disk with 2 ext4 partitions and created a backups directory in the desired
partition. I revised my script to point to the new directory. I verified
I could write to it, I cleaned off any files I had written, and then I ran
my newly-modified script.
Here is my script, absent the #!/bin/bash, the check for EUID, and the echo
commands and with names obscured and generally shortened. I run it as root:
rdiff-backup /etc
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName/backups/rdiff-backup-MachineName-etc
rdiff-backup /usr/local
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName/backups/rdiff-backup-MachineName-usr-local
dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ~/.dpkg-query
rdiff-backup --exclude /home/MyUserName/Documents/RemainingDirectoryPath1
--exclude /home/MyUserName/Documents/RemainingDirectoryPath2 --exclude
/home/MyUserName/Documents/RemainingDirectoryPath3 -b /home/MyUserName
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName/backups/rdiff-backup-MachineName-home-MyUserName
rdiff-backup -b /home/AnotherUserName
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName/backups/rdiff-backup-MachineName-home-AnotherUserName
In the process, I discovered that my old script had permission problems,
and I made some ad hoc and probably incorrect choices. Here's what I see
now:
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName:
total used in directory 28 available 1.6 TiB
drwxrwxrwx 4 MyUserName MyUserName 4096 Nov 5 20:18 .
drwxr-x---+ 4 root root 4096 Nov 5 20:07 ..
drwxr-xr-x 6 MyUserName MyUserName 4096 Nov 6 10:02 backups
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Nov 3 11:56 lost+found
/media/MyUserName/PartitionName/backups:
total used in directory 48 available 1.6 TiB
drwxr-xr-x 6 MyUserName MyUserName 4096 Nov 6 10:02 .
drwxrwxrwx 4 MyUserName MyUserName 4096 Nov 5 20:18
..
drwxr-xr-x 148 root root 12288 Nov 5 19:11
rdiff-backup-MachineName-etc
drwxr-xr-x 226 MyUserName MyUserName 20480 Nov 5 09:26
rdiff-backup-MachineName-home-MyUserName
drwxr-xr-x 36 AnotherUserName AnotherUserName 4096 Sep 1 14:25
rdiff-backup-MachineName-home-AnotherUserFirstName
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Sep 25 12:07
rdiff-backup-MachineName-usr-local
I think rdiff-backup-MachineName-home-MyUserName started off as 700 and I
changed it to 755 to be able to see it more readily--or maybe it was
PartitionName as 700 and I changed it to 777?
What should I have for permissions? Can I simply chmod these existing
directories or should I start over from the beginning? Should I have to
run this script as root? Is there a reason to avoid running it as root? I
see the examples don't run with elevated permissions; perhaps that would be
better.
A quick random scan of those four directories gives what I would expect:
MyUserName is the owner and group of the top-level contents of one
directory, AnotherUserName is of the other directory, and root is for the
other two. An even more cursory scan suggests permissions match between
the source and backup files.
Thanks,
Bill
PS: For a really rough benchmark, creating that initial backup of ca. 66
GiB took about 14 hours. I hibernated it overnight, which I think should
subtract ca. 9-10 hours from the real time, giving an overall rate of ca.
13-17 GiB/hour real time. user + sys was almost exactly 30 minutes.
--
Bill Harris
