John Andersen wrote:

On Friday 21 July 2006 12:03, Dave Howorth wrote:

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I have a system with two disks, each with some space, so I'm contemplating backing up the contents of each onto the other.

So you are currently using less than half of your total disk space?

Yes, that's right.

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I'd prefer a system that just mirrored the files, rather than consolidate them into an archive. Then I'll just update the mirrors each day.

Unison is nice. It allows you to be selective about what you will copy, and it can be run under cron so it will get done regularly. Its usually used between two different machines, but I don't see why it wouldn't work between two drives.

I used to use Unison to sync two machines. I found it had problems with files that change between its scan and copy phases (such as mail folders).

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Any ideas on what the best way to do this is (cp -a, rsync ??) or suggestions as to a better alternative?

Thanks, Dave

If you really can fit totally on one disk, you could repartition and mirror the drives with software raid. Its the easiest to keep in sync, and utterly reliable. But the re-partition and re-installation is probably a huge pain.

That's a good idea. But the disks are significantly different sizes and as you say, re-partitioning etc is more pain than I'm looking for. Thanks for the ideas, Dave -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Carlos E. R. wrote:

The Friday 2006-07-21 at 21:03 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:

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Any ideas on what the best way to do this is (cp -a, rsync ??) or suggestions as to a better alternative?

Something like:

for DIRECTORY in bin boot whatever do echo "*** Haciendo $DIRECTORY" rsync -a /$DIRECTORY /backup_one/ echo done df -h /backup_one/

When I use rsync, I generally use dirvish to front-end it. But thanks for this script, Dave -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Jigish Gohil wrote:

On 7/24/06, Dave Howorth wrote:

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Carlos E. R. wrote:

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The Friday 2006-07-21 at 21:03 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:

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Any ideas on what the best way to do this is (cp -a, rsync ??) or suggestions as to a better alternative?

Lookup iFolder

I'm not sure why? I'm not trying to copy between machines; I don't just want to copy things that are placed in specific places (i.e. iFolders); and it seems like a very heavyweight solution (mono, network protocols etc). What makes it more suitable than e.g. cp? Thanks, Dave -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

On 7/24/06, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

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Something like:

for DIRECTORY in bin boot whatever do echo "*** Haciendo $DIRECTORY" rsync -a /$DIRECTORY /backup_one/

rsync -a /$DIRECTORY /backup_one

Might work. Might not. At best no trailing slash (rsync has a weird syntax depending on slashes).

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echo done df -h /backup_one/

rsync -PHSav /{bin,boot,etc,home,lib,opt,root,sbin,srv,tftpboot,usr,var} /newloc --delete-after

Cheesy method for incremental backup.

Jan Engelhardt

I like rdiff-backup for this. Far less cheesy. FYI: It is in the distro. It is CLI like above, but I think there is a GUI being worked on. There is even a howto: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_rdiff_backup Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com