[ale] backup suggestions

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Wednesday 15 January 2003 07:59 am, John Wells wrote:
> I'm doing the vast majority of development on a laptop currently, and
> I'd like to back up all work to another one of my machines each evening
> before bed.
>
> What would you suggest as far as a backup solution?  While ideally I'd
> be able to image the entire drive (recover the full environment in the
> event of a crash), I don't know of any tools to do this.  My impulse is
> to write a script that will simply scp selected directories over to the
> box each night, but interested in hearing any other suggestions.  Anyone
> had experience with rsync?  Are there added benefits available from
> using it?

rsync rocks.  It is clever about finding which files have changed.  It is 
even more clever about reducing bandwidth.  It can magically download only 
the parts of the files that changed without downloading the whole file.

Assuming you can rsh from your laptop to your desktop, on the laptop run 
   rsync -a --delete / desktop:/backupdir/
If you'd rather use ssh instead of rsh do
   rsync -e ssh -a --delete / desktop:/backupdir/

You may want to play with the --exclude directive to keep some files from 
getting copied and maybe --one-file-system so that /proc doesn't get 
copied, too.

I've done this with whole file systems, though I would recommend that you 
do it only occasionally for the whole file system, but daily for your home 
directory.  It's fast, but a couple gig of files is going to take a while 
no matter what.

--Michael
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