Karl -- So on my first attempt, I realized that I need to exclude the /media directory, or else the backup drive will attempt to back up itself. OK, that's fine.
On the second attempt, the backup got into the /proc directory, complained about some files disappearing, and then froze. I don't have these problems on my work computer, where I use rsync, but there I only back up my home directory. Here I'm trying to do the entire filesystem (actually both the root and boot filesystems). So it's a much larger world. -PT On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenb...@gmail.com > wrote: > Well, after having some difficulty getting rsync to do exactly what I want, > I've become convinced to try rsnapshot. I'll let you know how it goes. > > -PT > > > On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Peter Tenenbaum < > peter.g.tenenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Jochen, Paul -- >> >> In thinking this over, I think that the best approach is to simply have a >> daily rsync --archive from my main hard drive to the backup drive. While I >> understand that more sophisticated backup systems are often useful in a >> large system, the system in question is a home computer with only 2 users. >> The file complement changes but slowly, and we never delete and rarely >> overwrite files, so there's no need to be able to, say, recover the 3 days >> ago version of a file. The backup system is mainly there for disaster >> recovery, with daily backups preferred just so that we don't lose many >> e-mail messages in the event of a catastrophic failure. >> >> Do you concur that a simple rsync makes more sense in this context, or do >> you think that I would still benefit from using either the --link-dest >> option or rsnapshot? >> >> -PT >> > >
