I'm dithering over this too much, I need some advice. I apologize for
the length of this and hope I haven't left out any essential detail.
I want to do nightly snapshots of my Leopard server using an rsync
script and a filter file to a locally connected firewire drive.
The rync command I'm considering is:
rsync -vq -a -x --delete-excluded -A -X --filter=". $FLTR" --link-
dest=$OLD --log-file=$LOG // $NEW
and the filter file I'm considering is:
- /Network/*
- /Previous Systems.localized
- /Volumes/*
- /afs/*
- /automount/*
- /cores/*
- /dev/*
- /private/tmp/*
- /private/var/imap/socket/*
- /private/var/run/*
- /private/var/spool/postfix/*
- /private/var/spool/postfix/private/*
- /private/var/spool/postfix/public/*
- /private/var/vm/*
- /proc
- /tmp/*
: .rsync-filter
- */.Trash
- .Spotlight-*/
The version of rsync is 3.0.2 from macports.
Here's what I think this all does (in other words, what I want it to
do):
-vq : produce error messages
-a : archive mode
-x : only one file system
--delete-excluded : delete files no longer present & any excluded files
-A : copy acls
-X : copy extra attribute
--filter=". $FLTR" : load filter from file $FLTR
--link-dest=$OLD : copy only files that are different from those in
directory $OLD
--log-file=$LOG : write log into file $LOG
// : the base of the source tree is the filesystem root directory
$NEW : the copy is placee immediately under diectory $NEW
In the filter file, a line of the form "- /SOME-PATH/*" means copy the
directory /SOME-PATH but nothing under it.
A line of the form ": .rsync-filter" means incorporate filter rules
from any .rsync-filter file found and apply them to everything in and
beneath its directory.
The line "- */.Trash" means don't copy any .Trash file, even the one
in the root directory.
The line "- .Spotlight-*/" means copy all directories whose names
match ".Spotlight-*" but nothing beneath them.
The filter file is sort of the union of several examples I found on
the Internet, I haven't been able to locate a "definitive" filter file
for OS/X server. Do I have too much or too little in there?
So I'm hoping that someone who has some experience with this could
look this over and let me know of any looming problems I haven't seen.
I have one other question: there are several different kinds of
databases in /private/var, including openldap, squirrelmail, and so
on. It seems to me that one way to handle the problem of getting valid
backups of a variety of different database types would be to (somehow)
bring the system down long enough to rsync /private/var only, then
bring it back up and do the rest of the snapshot. This would probably
be less than five minutes of downtime. Alternatively, the whole
snapshot could be done with the system in single-user mode. I don't
yet have a feel for how long the incremental snapshot will take. I
could probably live with an hour or less per night of downtime,
especially if it substantially increased the value of the snapshot.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or comments.
Cheers,
Greg Shenaut
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