A while back I wrote about my backups scripts I made with rsync. I have since refined my scripts, and am now using rdiff-backup instead, which creates versioned backups. I delete backups older than 6 weeks, so I can roll back to any backup I've made in the last 6 weeks. I would prefer if I could specify the frequency of the versions... for example, make a backup a day for the past 45 days, and hold onto a version per month for every month before 45 days, forever. However, rdiff-backup does not support this. There are several hand-rolled solutions out there using bash scripts and rsync, however I prefer the plug-and-play ease of use offered by rdiff-backup.
My new dailybackup script is below.
BASH:
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#!/bin/sh
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ARCHIVEROOT=/Volumes/backup/backup ;
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###########################################
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## Home Directory #########################
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###########################################
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SOURCEDIR=/Users/john/ ;
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ARCHIVENAME=PowerBookHomeDirectory-rdiff-backup ;
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rdiff-backup \
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-v4 \
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--print-statistics \
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--exclude-sockets \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR"tmp/" \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR"Library/Caches/" \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR"Library/Safari/Icons" \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR"Desktop/downloads/" \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR".Trash/" \
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--exclude $SOURCEDIR"Movies/Democracy/" \
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$SOURCEDIR $ARCHIVEROOT/$ARCHIVENAME ;
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rdiff-backup --print-statistics --force --remove-older-than 6W $ARCHIVEROOT/$ARCHIVENAME
Very nice! I think I'll give this a try. No matter how I try, I'm still terrible at back-ups.
me too. Very nice.
Is the backup volume on the network, or local?
/Volumes on OS X is the mount point for external drives and network drives. In my case it's an external firewire drive.
Any opinion on services like Mozy?
Hmm ... do links work? Test: Mozy
I've never used one of those services. I could used rdiff-backup to push the backups to my dreamhost account, but that would take hours and hours for the first backup and a lot of time for each subsequent backup. I suppose I could do it in the middle of the night...
Yeah, it's taking a while (~1.5 gb/day) for me on Mozy, but I'm not backing up everything, and I just leave it running all the time (there's a slider to adjust how much network it's using, so that things aren't super slow when I actually want to use the computer, but I put it back to full blast before going to bed or work).