My recommendations...
1. Backup entire disk to another disk, verbatim. That is,
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=10M
First, you don't have to waste time figuring out what to back up.
Second, if disk fails, you can just swap the disks, and copy over
only the new files since last dd.
2. Backup entire /home to another disk. That is,
mount /home/sdZ /mnt/home
rsync -aHxv -SAX /home/ /mnt/home/ --delete --exclude='/*/.gvfs'
Again, I would copy the whole things. If you have somethings that
you don't want to backup, then you can put them in
/home/dont_backup, and add it to exclude list,
--exclude='/dont_backup'
3. If your /home is on BTRFS filesystem, you can take snapshots, like
btrfs subvolume snapshot -r home home--$(date +%F)
Harddisk is "cheap", and snapshot is "cheaper".
--
William
On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 12:11:15PM -0500, John Moniz via talk wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm backing up my system on a more regular basis and am trying to fine tune
> the files that I backup. I am looking for advice on what NOT to bother to
> backup on the /home directory.
>
> I am using rsync (took a long time and lots of trials to figure out the man
> page - and still don't know 90% of it) and presently have the following on
> my exclude_list.txt:
> (Note: multiple items shown on one line are just for readability, each line
> in the file only has one item)
>
> tmp* TMP*
> .cache* cache* Cache* CACHE* *CACHE *Cache *cache
> .cookies* cookies*
> Trash Trash* TRASH*
> Junk* junk*
> .gvfs
> Backups backups
> Crash*
> .xsession-errors*
> .macromedia
> .thumbnails
> .mozilla/firefox/*/thumbnails
> *.corrupt
> minidumps
> .local/share/gvfs*
>
> I'd love to exclude things that perhaps one would never use from a backup to
> rebuild a system after an accidental clean wipe of all data.
>
> Similarly, any recommendations of what I should back up outside of /home? I
> am thinking of things like /etc/fstab, files that would make it easier to
> recover from a crash or to upgrade a distro.
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
> John.
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