[PLUG] What are .lock files

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:27:53 -0700
"Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:

> On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 11:54 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Every time I try to do a backup it stops when it hits a .lock file.
> >  This kills dead the idea of unattended backups. Using locate I find a
> >  dozen of them on my hard disk.
> >
> >  It takes only 15 minutes to complete a backup of ~/, but it's annoying
> >  to come back to the computer only to discover that the backup stopped
> >  halfway through when it hit a .lock file.
> 
> If the .lock file exists, it there as a temporary file.  After a reboot, or
> worst case after a restore, these files are of no value.  They are of
> no value to the backup either.  Figure out a way to ignore the .lock files
> in your backup.

That's kind of what I figured a .lock file was. 

I back up only sporadically because I don't create important stuff
every day. I just back up after I have done something that I want to be
sure I don't lose - which ends up averaging about once a week.
Sometimes it might be every day for several days in a row, then none
for a couple of weeks during which all I did was browse and read
e-mails. I also use my thumb drive for a quickie backup of new work.

Because of my simple needs I use Nautilus to drag ~/ on my laptop to a
folder on my desktop computer. That's where I run into the .lock
problem. Today I decided to try the cp command instead, but cp won't
copy directories unless I can figure out the command, and the man page
eludes my comprehension. 

Today I wanted to make a more thorough backup in anticipation of doing
an apt-get dist-upgrade to Hardy. I decided to try to rsync to an empty
folder on the desktop. It worked great for ~/, but when I tried other
folders I got a lot of errors - permission denied, even when I sudo'ed
it. From past experience, rsync is a pain. Lots of bugs, and horribly
complex. I've also used tar and dar, but I don't like my backups
compressed and everything all in one file. Disk space is cheap. I want
to be able to look at the folder where I backed stuff up to,
right-click and do Properties, and have it tell me that it has the same
exact number of files and the number of bytes is identical to the
original folder. Then I feel comfortable that it's all there. Plus, if
I accidentally delete a file I can just go grab it from the backup
folder without having to untar it or run a restore program. I like to
KISS.

I know there are scripts, but I don't understand them either, or how to
modify them to suit my needs.

Thanks to all for the replies. I'll just keep struggling.