[PLUG] Rsync advice needed

[Rich Shepard]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2020, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> But now I am considering setting up a cron job to do backups to the 1TB
> SSD. I didn't do this before because my old computer had only 512G for /
> and /home, and I often needed the SSD for storage. My new computer has a
> 1TB NVMe for / and /home, and each partition is only about 30% used, so I
> no longer need the SSD for storage.

> Added thought: This does not need to be a clone of the partitions with dd
> or such. I just want to be able to recover a single file or folder that I
> shouldn't have deleted.
>
> Suggestions welcome!

John,

There are many available backup options. For a long time I've used dirvish
which uses rsync to make incremental backups. The initial setup can take a
bit of time but once that's done it just does its thing and you don't need
to pay any attention to it.

I have a 2T hard drive for backups of /, /home, /opt, and /data the four
partitions on my 2-drive desktop (250G SSD hosting / and a 2T hard drive
hosting the other three partitions). A cron job (run by root) at 00:30 every
day runs dirvish-backup.sh:

#!/bin/bash
#MAILTO=rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
#TS=`date`
mount /mnt/backup
/usr/sbin/dirvish-expire --quiet
/usr/sbin/dirvish-runall --quiet
umount /mnt/backup
#echo "$TS - Dirvish Backup Completed" | mail $MAILTO
exit 0

Only those files which have changed since the last backup are backed up.
You can set expiration dates so you don't keep all incremental backups
forever.

There have been many times when I've needed a file that I had deleted and
it's a simple matter to copy that file from one of the backed up files.

It's reliable, hands-free once set up and Just Works(TM). And there's plenty
of help getting the initial scripts and full backup from folks here and on
the dirvish mail list. For the record, Keith maintiained dirvish and its web
site for many years before he retired and others have continued. Like TeX
dirvish is stable and only rarely does a message asking for help pop up on
the mail list.

Regards,

Rich