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 Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
