[PLUG] Network storage

[Larry Brigman]

On 1/16/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:36:21 -0800
> "Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:
>
> > a linksys nslu2 will allow you to plug your usb drive into it and if
> > you switch it
> > to linux you could make it a rsync server.
>
> Thanks for that advice. It's nice to know that an nslu2 will work well.
> But I just discovered that my USB drive is 150 GB, not 250 GB as I
> thought. Also, it occurs to me that I'd like to use whatever drive I
> have to back up the Windows desktop as well, not that there will be
> much backing up to do, as little as I use it nowadays.
Look at the other LINUX-NSLU2 supported NAS devices like the Iomega StorCenter.
>
> I think I'd rather go back to my original idea of getting a straight
> network drive, say 400 GB. I could use it for both the Windows desktop
> and the Linux laptop, using rsync. I'd create one partition with ext3
> and another with NTFS. I'm not sure how to do that, but if I want
> permissions and ownerships to be saved from Linux it can't be FAT32;
> and if I want Windows to see it it has to be either FAT32 or NTFS. So
> the only solution is to use two different partitions, one for each
> platform.
>
> > Here is a rsyncd.conf file that I use to backup a full system.
>
> <config file saved>
>
> I read about config files, but I have some questions:
>
> The uid means the user id, but which user? I am jcj on the Windows
> desktop and jjj on the Linux laptop. Similarly, the gid means group id,
> but my group on Windows is workgroup and on Linux the group is jjj
> (jjj:jjj). Which of these do I use?
The uid/gid is that of the running daemon for security in server mode
only not file
permissions.

> Also, I note you are excluding /sys and /tmp, which I did not do. (I
> just excluded /proc and /media.) Is it a good idea to exclude these
> additional folders? And I just did --exclude=/proc, where you have
> exclude=proc/* (and so on). Should I have the /* after the folder in
> the exclude statement? I never know whether to add the / or not.

My testing shows that it is safer to use proc or proc/* not /proc on
the exclude of the
server config.  I don't know if rsync parses the command lines the
same as the config
but I would assume so.  proc/* allows a full backup to get directory
but not its contents
so a restore should work from a livecd without any additional work.

/tmp should not be backed up as it should only be used by the programs
currently
running on the machine.
/sys is the kernel's sys filesystem.  It is only valid on the existing
running kernel just
like /proc.  Trying to restore /sys on to a running kernel would give
nothing but errors.