Re: rsync backup question

[<briand@aracnet.com>]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:39:33 -0400
"Thomas H. George" <lists@tomgeorge.info> wrote:

> I partitioned a 1 TG usbdrive as ext3, mounted it as /usbmem and entered
> the command rsync -r / /usbmem.  The tranfer proceeded with many
> messages "skipping non-regular file 'foo'".  Eventually the transfer
> hung up with some messages "file has vanished 'foo'". I aborted with a
> ctl-c.  df -h reported 
> 
> Script started on Thu 21 Jul 2011 06:08:03 PM EDT
> dragon:~# df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sdc1              71G   48G   20G  72% /
> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
> udev                  2.0G  276K  2.0G   1% /dev
> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sdb5              44G  181M   42G   1% /i386chroot
> /dev/sdb6             276G   76G  186G  30% /data
> /dev/sda1             1.7G   35M  1.6G   3% /temp
> /dev/sda5              27G  4.9G   21G  20% /storage
> /dev/sdd1             917G  101G  770G  12% /usbmem
> dragon:~# exit
> 
> Script done on Thu 21 Jul 2011 06:08:14 PM EDT
> 
> Clearly most of the files have been transfered and I can read them on
> /usbmem.
> 
> My object had been to backup everything before moving from Squeeze to
> Wheezy
> 
> Any Suggestions?
> 
> 

I'm not exactly sure what you want, but to use rsync as a backup tool, I think that you should use the -a option.

Also you can run rsync with the -u and -n option and that should give you a list of things that were not copied.

I mean if the goal is just backup of files you want to keep, i.e. you are not trying to clone a disk, you're probably better off targetting the directories of interest so that you're not just copying everything blindly.

Generally when I've done similar sorts of things I just us "cp -a".


Brian