The ** seems to be a rdiff-backup 'feature' matching strings including /'s. so **.iso would find anything ending in .iso in any directory being backed up.
You do need to decide if your backing up your personal files or everything. As keith points out using a tool that backs up everything, means you can restore the data on a new disk, and be ready to go when a disk crashes. (maybe some fiddling with the boot blocks). OTOH, just backing up 'personal' files means when the disk dies, you get a copy of the OS distribution, reload the OS, and then restore your data. At the 1000 ft level it's a toss up. The image backup will probably be a faster reload. Only backing up personal files means if you did any customization to you system you have to remember what you did. What were those 27 extra packages you loaded?... Or ignore the missing 'custom' packages and when you notice it's missing, stop what your doing, download the package and go on. If your on the internet that's not too bad an approach nowadays. back to all those error messages - lots of stuff in / you might want to skip /proc, /dev, /run are magic system created by the kernel and should be skipped, no personal files there, /run as you found has sockets that running processes create. If you just after personal files, /lib, /lib32, /lib64 /bin, /sbin, /root, /usr are all system files that would be regenerated with a system reload - and you need to know what your doing if you try to build these with a system install, then piecemeal copy additional files from your backup into these directories. -- of course if you put stuff in /usr/local you might want to backup that, and all the personal data, whereever that is. steve John Jason Jordan wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jul 2014 12:52:47 -0700 > Keith Lofstrom <kei...@gate.kl-ic.com> dijo: > >> On Fri, Jul 04, 2014 at 10:16:25AM -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote: >>> - /sys >> ... >>> - **.iso >>> - **.ISO >> Don't you want a single asterisk rather than two? /dev has been >> mentioned - don't back that up, the startup process builds that. > There must be a reason I used two, but I don't recall what it was. > Probably something I found in rdiff-backup documentation when I > originally created the excludes file. > >> Make sure you are using the dateext extension for logrotate. >> Log files grow over time, and that can create a large file at >> every backup. > It's simpler just to get enough disk space. Bear in mind that my entire > home folder (not counting the Distros folder) is only about 70 GB. > That's all the data that I have created and deemed worthy of keeping > since I started using computers. And 99% of it never changes, and has > also been backed up on other drives. Several times a year I take an old > external USB drive and make a backup of ~/ to it, and then the drive > goes back in the fireproof file cabinet where it lives. > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
