[xubuntu-users] Rookie question on backups

[lukshuntim at gmail.com]

On Friday, July 07, 2017 06:34 AM, Peter Flynn wrote:
> On 07/06/2017 03:05 PM, Joao Monteiro wrote:
>> I won't ask anybody to painfully type the instructions for me... I
>> just ask that someone please post a link to "where" can I read and
>> learn about how to do it, as I'm sure there's such a way in linux...

@Joao,

There're *lots* of information out there, if you just fire up your 
favourite search engine. :-)

Just off my head, arch wiki has some good articles, IMHO,

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_backup
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Synchronization_and_backup_programs

I learnt a lot from Curtis Preston's book 'Backup & Recovery'. Some may 
consider it dated as it was before the age of clouds. The title itself 
is already instructive.

> 
> the 'man' command will display the manual page, eg
> man tar
> man rsync
> 
> I use grsync, the graphical interface to rsync, but...
> 
>> as a "batch-like" manner...
> 
> This is a separate question. Once you have worked out the correct
> command for what you want to do, you can store it in a utility called
> cron and have it run in batch mode at predetermined times. Use the
> command 'crontab' to do this; man 5 crontab will explain the format of a
> crontab entry.
> 
> grsync can export the rsync command it uses, so here's mine: I back up
> my home directory to an external USB disk mounted at /media/peter/backup
> I exclude all the SVN repositories listed in repos because the repos get
> backup up independently; I also exclude a list of directories which have
> huge amounts of transient or machine-created metadata which I don't want
> taking up time and space.
> 
> rsync -r -t -p -o -g -v --progress -l -s \
>     --exclude-from=/home/peter/repos \
>     --exclude=Downloads/ \
>     --exclude=.thunderbird/ \
>     --exclude=.cache/ \
>     --exclude=.config/ \
>     --exclude=.cxoffice/ \
>     --exclude=.mozilla/ \
>     --exclude=.wine/ \
>     --exclude=.thumbnails/ \
>     --exclude=.rvm/ \
>     /home/peter  /media/peter/backup
> 
> The options grsync added for me in the first line can be seen in the man
> page for rsync.

It is a pleasant surprise to see most respondents suggest rsync :-), at 
least up to this moment.

I use it also but in the form of a wrapper called rsnapshot. It's 
available in most linux distributions and in ubuntu too, of course. The 
official web site is here:

http://rsnapshot.org/

Wish you a happy linux journey with no loss of a single byte of datum,
-- st