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. This is my globbing-filelist, which I name "rdb_exclude.txt": mcu...@drifter:~$ cat Documents/rdb_exclude.txt - /home/mcubed/.adobe - /home/mcubed/.bogofilter - /home/mcubed/.cache - /home/mcubed/.compiz - /home/mcubed/.dbus - /home/mcubed/.gnupg - /home/mcubed/.gpilotd - /home/mcubed/.gvfs - /home/mcubed/.local/share/Trash - /home/mcubed/.macromedia - /home/mcubed/.mozilla/firefox/zljdhijx.default/Cache - /home/mcubed/.thumbnails - /home/mcubed/.update-notifier - /home/mcubed/Desktop - /home/mcubed/.ICEauthority - /home/mcubed/.gksu.lock - /home/mcubed/.gpilotd.pid 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 all goes on one line.) 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. I'm not completely 100% sure you need to use absolute paths in all cases -- I did for clarity's sake. (When I'm in somewhat unfamiliar territory, I find it easier to use absolute paths so I can always be sure what I doing and not end up relying on expansion when I shouldn't or thinking I'm indicating one thing when I'm actually indicating something else.) I think the man page says something about that. In any case, it will work if you do always use absolute paths, so perhaps that's the safer bet. It just means a little more typing. :-) 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). -- Michael M. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
