Scheduled Backups of Home Directory

[Matthew Kuiken]

Gregory Piñero wrote:
> I want to start running scheduled backups of my home directory.  I
> have my eye on writing a bash script to mount my second hard drive
> (ext3 format) and then run rsync on /home.
>
> Here are the questions I'm having:
> 1. I'm thinking mount and maybe rsync of /home involve sudo.
> a. Is that true?
> b. How can I schedule/automate a script that needs root privledges?
>
> 2. Is there a way to tell the rsync command to exclude directories?
> a. It's no big deal if I can't, I'm just curious since I obviously
> don't care about the trash folders, etc.
>
> 3. What file changes detections method is best, checksum, time, or
> something else?  I think these are options?
>
> Here's my bash script so far in hopes you'll have some feedback:
> sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc1 /mnt/backup_drive/
> rsync -ac /home/ /mnt/backup_drive
>
> Much thanks in advance.
>   

I got a lot of information on using rsync from this web site:

http://servers.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/11/04/0346256&tid=119&tid=47&pagenum=2

It is mainly about using it over ssh, but has a lot of information on 
how to use rsync and cp to create incremental backups on a rotating 
basis, while using just a little more space than the drive it is backing 
up.  (Depending on the rate that your files change, it uses hard links 
to keep files that didn't change from the last rotation without taking 
up more disk space.)

I found it tremendously helpful in creating my backup strategy.  If 
you'd like my scripts for example as well, just let me know.  The main 
thing you'd need to change would be running mount/umount rather than 
connecting to the networked file server.

-Matt