[PLUG] When mounted doesn't mean mounted

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Jun 25 01:01:40 UTC 2009


On Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:50:42 -0700
"Michael M. Moore" <michael at writemoore.net> dijo:

> On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 15:30 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > 
> > I suspect part of the problem is the pybackpack GUI for rdiff-backup.
> > Before tossing out rdiff-backup completely I'm going to see if dumbass
> > me can learn how to use it from the command line. 
> 
> It's really pretty simple -- the man page is somewhat overwhelming
> because there are a load of options, but there probably are very few you
> actually need to worry about, unless you're trying to do fancy,
> elaborate things.  And unlike many *nix man pages, this one actually
> provides some useful examples.  Also, the website provides some helpful
> examples and usage cases.
> 
> The main option you will probably want is to construct a list of
> directories you want to exclude from your backup (including the infamous
> ~/.gvfs).  There are a couple of different ways to do that.  What I do
> is use the option --include-globbing-filelist.
<snip>
> The "-" (minus sign) means those directories will be excluded from my
> backup.  So my complete command is:
> 
> $ rdiff-backup --include-globbing-filelist
>  /home/mcubed/Documents/rdb_exclude.txt /home/mcubed /backup/back_uhome
>
> That copies everything in /home/mcubed to /backup/back_uhome --
> everything except those directories or files I don't want to backup,
> which I put into the file list.  (The file list itself, of course, does
> get backed-up, because it resides in /home/mcubed/Documents and I do
> backup that directory.
> If you're going to be backing up directories owned by root, you'll need
> to use sudo to do those.  You shouldn't need to use sudo when you're
> backing up /home/jjj (presuming, of course, that user jjj has write
> access to your backup directory).

I found the man page overwhelming, and the wiki and FAQ equally so. The
problem is that they assume more knowledge of how commands and
filesystems work than I have. 

However, I have concocted the following which I think will back up
everything to the disk in the Ultrabay (assume all one line):

rdiff-backup
	--exclude /proc
	--exclude/ media
	--exclude /mnt
	--exclude /tmp
	--exclude /home/jjj/.gvfs
/
/media/disk2/Full_system_backup/

The above is to be run after I verify that disk2 is really mounted. And
the folder /Full_system_backup exists.

Issues that I am unclear about:

1) What if /Full_system_backup already exists and contains a previous
backup?
2) How do I make an incremental backup?

It seems to me that the real power of rdiff-backup is to make
incremental backups which can be treated as full backups because they
contain links to files in previous backups when the files have not
changed. Thus, assuming my understanding is correct, I should make one
full system backup, and thereafter only incremental backups. Another
full system backup should never be necessary. Or have I misunderstood
that?

And, 3) How do I make sure that it will back up to the disk in the
Ultrabay and not to the mount point?



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