On 14/10/2020 14:58, Walter Dnes wrote:
I'd like to keep my "hot backup" machine more up-to-date. The most
important directory is my home directory. So far, I've been doing
occasional tarballs of my home directory and pushing them over. I
exclude some directories for "reasons". I'd like to switch to rsync
and run it more often. I've done the RTFM, but I'd more eyes to check
this out before the first run.
I haven't yet set up my system, but a couple of tweaks I'm planning to
add ...
Either use btrfs, or an lvm partition, so you can take snapshots.
Do an in-place rsync (ie if part of a file has changed, it only writes
the bit that's changed).
That way, you get a full backup for the price of an incremental.
The main change from your approach is that this will keep both an old
and new copy of any file that has changed.
The big change you could make from your approach is that you CAN delete
files from the backup if they've been deleted on the live system,
without losing them.
Horses for courses, but if you are planning to keep your backup
long-term, this could do a good job, provided you remember when you
deleted that lost file from your live system :-)
I'm planning to back up 6TB of live data onto a 12TB shingled disk,
which shouldn't be a problem, and given that not much changes (apart
from adding new photos), each backup will probably use a few gigs at
most. Dunno how long the disk will last, but it should be ages.
Cheers,
Wol
