[PLUG] rsync

[Bruce Kilpatrick]

On 04/27/2011 04:30 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:00:47PM -0700, Bruce Kilpatrick wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> I have been playing around with rsync getting ready to upgrade to
>> Natty.  I have an encrypted /home and some reading suggests that
>> occasional failures happen to the home partition during installation.
>>
>> I put together a script sometime back and the external hard drive is now
>> full.  Have deleted some old backups that weren't necessary to make some
>> room.  Looking at the logfile...some adjustments are in order.
>>
>> The question is which of the dot files are really necessary to keep, and
>> will it save much room if they are not copied?
> With the rsync hardlink option, and the huge hard disks available
> these days, you can save thousands of daily snapshots on a hard
> disk.  The dot files take up almost no room, compared to the log
> files and the big data files I create.  I can typically get a
> year of daily images from 6 machines on a $80 2 terabyte disk
> (using the "dirvish" application, written by a friend and hosted
> on my server).
>
> Besides personal files, the dot files are probably the most
> important files on your system.  They contain a lot of
> personalization information.  After an unfortunate glibc
> upgrade, my .gnome2 and .metacity files got mangled by a
> misbehaving desktop, and the daily backups were important
> ways of finding out what went wrong, and the source of the
> most recent working versions of these dot directories.
>
> The browser cache is in .mozilla .  I haven't looked, but
> that is probably the biggest user of dot file space.  You
> might want to investigate, perhaps add that to your rsync
> --exclude-from= file.  Don't save that pr0n where the cops
> can find it!  Let us know what you figure out about that.
>
> Keith
>
Keith,

Thanks.  I knew they were the config files.  Just wondered if there were 
some more important than the others.  I just remembered I am working 
with a 60G partition and have been backing up 3 machines for a number of 
years.  A new external HD is seriously in order.

Not to worry about the pr0n...it is buried well...I myself will never 
find it!!