Quick backup

Johnny Rosenberg gurus.knugum at gmail.com
Sun Sep 16 19:11:05 UTC 2012


I wrote a backup Bash-script many years ago. It works perfectly and it
backs up selected folders to an external USB drive. Works excellent,
as I said, but everything can be just a little bit better, right?
So now I have some thoughts about this.
You are using your computer for different stuff. Now and then you save
files, no matter what software you are using. Could be LibreOffice,
Audacity, Ardour, even your web browser, maybe an email client, if you
use one, maybe the touch command in a terminal and so on. Is there
something in the system that can be read that logs everything that's
written to (or removed from) the file system? Or is there a signal
somewhere telling the system that ”this.file was written to/removed
from /path/to/the/file/in/question/ at 2012-09-16 21:02:18” or
something like that?

Sometimes a do a backup, then I open a file for editing, change some
stuff, save it, then do a new backup. Sometimes I wonder why the new
backup takes some time; I only changed one file, right?
I don't want my USB drive to be powered on all the time (it's not
quiet enough for that), so what about if I could read the system for
when and where files are saved and save that info to a text file?
Then, before shutting down, I could just run a script that reads that
file and copy only those files to their corresponding places on that
USB drive (reminding me to turn it on if I didn't – something that my
present backup script already does).

Is this possible? It should be, because UbuntuOne already does it, as
it seems. But maybe I can't do it from a Bash-script? It would mean
very quick backups anyway, since it didn't need to search the whole
USB disk for missing files or files that need to be removed.



Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg
ジョニー・ローゼンバーグ




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