On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 04:29:41PM -0500, Jonathan Thornburg wrote: > Etienne Robillard <robillard.etienne () gmail ! com> wrote > > i kinda like cpio for fast backup of filesystems... for large media > > files (think anime movies) -- I think its generally best to just > > burn them on a iso.. > > I have found rsync to an external usb hard disk to work very nicely; > these are now cheap and readily available up to over a terabyte. > Here are a few notes from my experience using this strategy for the > past several years:
I do the same for my laptop. I use a drive compatible with my laptop in an USB enclosure. I partition the USB disk identical to the one in my laptop and use rsync to clone the data. Should the drive in my laptop fail, I can just pop the disk out of the USB enclosure and into the laptop. It's also possible to just boot off the USB disk. > #!/bin/sh > set -x > rsync -aHESvv --delete \ > --exclude '/home/jonathan/crypt/*' \ > --exclude '/mnt/oxygen/home/jonathan/crypt/*' \ > /home/jonathan/ /mnt/oxygen/home/jonathan/ > This works fine except that the --exclude options are not honored > (files under those directories are still copied). I don't know what's > wrong there... They are honored. The path is relative. You're actually excluding '/home/jonathan/home/jonathan/crypt/*', etc. rsync -aHESvv --delete --exclude '/crypt/*' \ /home/jonathan/ /mnt/oxygen/home/jonathan/ This link[1] and rsnapshot in ports may also be of interest to some. [1] http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/