[Discuss] How do you backup "/" with rsync?

[R. Langkamer]

On 12/10/07 12:02 AM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

<snip>

> I should also say that because of the tremendous speed of the internal and
> external SATA drives, rsync powers through the 60GB of OS + dump/restore
> backups in /backup + personal files in /home in just a few minutes when
> there are just a few files that have been changed.  So to my mind an
> external SATA drive is the ideal backup system for an internal SATA drive
> since you get tremendous speed, reliability, capacity, AND bootability 
> for a
> price tag of only $200. The only reason I am continuing with a parallel
> dump/restore backup at the moment is (a) I am used to it, and (b) you get
> efficient snapshots both in terms of the time required to create them and
> the disk-space consumed by them. However, apparently there is a way to get
> efficient snapshots with rsync as well (using the --link-dest option) so
> once I have that figured out, I plan to drop dump/restore altogether.
> 
> Alan


	Wow! Well detailed information. As for the section above, I think this 
is very similar to what Apple's new backup software does. It uses hard 
links for unchanged items but it uses copies for changed items. For 
detailed information can be read at ars technica.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

	For the "i just want it to work" group of people, the Mac OS, and now 
Time Machine, fill this need very, very well. For those of us that are 
more technically inclined (and/or "i have to do it myself because i want 
to know how and know that i can do it"), there will always be ways we 
can do it ourselves. Case in point, while there are plenty of backup 
utilities I could use on my current Mac OS X systems, I am often only 
needing to sync certain locations. As such, I use my "rsync PAVER" command.

rsync -Pavr (add -n to do a dry run if need be and if you want stats add 
--stats)

	It would be interesting though, to see someone create/implement what 
Time Machine does, on their Linux box(s).

-- 

Sincerely,

R. Langkamer

cross platform specialist
Mac - Linux - windows

Langkamer I.T.
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