[GTALUG] What Not To Backup

[Mauro Souza]

I use backintime for my local backups. It keeps history of files, so even
if you accidentally alter a file and discovers a month later, you can
recover the last version.
If you have a VPS somewhere, like me, you can use syncthing or owncloud
too. They are very good for backups.

I keep a local backintime backup, rsync to a raspberry pi every night, and
sync it to the VPS every week.

On Dec 23, 2016 5:21 PM, "William Park via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> My recommendations...
>
> 1.  Backup entire disk to another disk, verbatim.  That is,
>         dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=10M
>
>     First, you don't have to waste time figuring out what to back up.
>     Second, if disk fails, you can just swap the disks, and copy over
>     only the new files since last dd.
>
> 2.  Backup entire /home to another disk.  That is,
>         mount /home/sdZ /mnt/home
>         rsync -aHxv -SAX /home/ /mnt/home/ --delete --exclude='/*/.gvfs'
>
>     Again, I would copy the whole things.  If you have somethings that
>     you don't want to backup, then you can put them in
>     /home/dont_backup, and add it to exclude list,
>         --exclude='/dont_backup'
>
> 3.  If your /home is on BTRFS filesystem, you can take snapshots, like
>         btrfs subvolume snapshot -r home home--$(date +%F)
>
>     Harddisk is "cheap", and snapshot is "cheaper".
> --
> William
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 12:11:15PM -0500, John Moniz via talk wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I'm backing up my system on a more regular basis and am trying to fine
> tune
> > the files that I backup. I am looking for advice on what NOT to bother to
> > backup on the /home directory.
> >
> > I am using rsync (took a long time and lots of trials to figure out the
> man
> > page - and still don't know 90% of it) and presently have the following
> on
> > my exclude_list.txt:
> > (Note: multiple items shown on one line are just for readability, each
> line
> > in the file only has one item)
> >
> > tmp* TMP*
> > .cache* cache* Cache* CACHE* *CACHE *Cache *cache
> > .cookies* cookies*
> > Trash Trash* TRASH*
> > Junk* junk*
> > .gvfs
> > Backups backups
> > Crash*
> > .xsession-errors*
> > .macromedia
> > .thumbnails
> > .mozilla/firefox/*/thumbnails
> > *.corrupt
> > minidumps
> > .local/share/gvfs*
> >
> > I'd love to exclude things that perhaps one would never use from a
> backup to
> > rebuild a system after an accidental clean wipe of all data.
> >
> > Similarly, any recommendations of what I should back up outside of
> /home? I
> > am thinking of things like /etc/fstab, files that would make it easier to
> > recover from a crash or to upgrade a distro.
> >
> > Thanks for any advice.
> >
> > John.
> > ---
> > Talk Mailing List
> > talk at gtalug.org
> > https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> ---
> Talk Mailing List
> talk at gtalug.org
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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