Backup Central

Hello,

I'm new to the list (and actually never post in mailing lists), so
excuse me if I make a mistake or something.

I've searched the archives for my 'problem', to no avail. The older
archives don't allow you to search and my search on Google didn't give
me any good results either.

My question is pretty simple: Can I back up multiple directories using
rdiff-backup (if so, how?) or do I need to write a shell script and loop
trough a list of directories?

Thanks,

Jochem

Jochem van Leeuwen wrote:
Can I back up multiple directories using
rdiff-backup (if so, how?) or do I need to write a shell script and loop
trough a list of directories?

Yes you can, or you can write a script (or take one already written).
Surprisingly, the man page for rdiff-backup discusses various techniques
for doing this. The best approach depends on how much of the system you
want to backup. You could elect to backup the entire filesystem and use
the various "exclude" options to not backup, say, /proc and /tmp (and,
in reality, probably others). Another approach is to have a list of
directories to be backed up held in a file; there's a command option to
read from that file. Personally, I run multiple rdiff-backup jobs from a
script.

--
Keith Edmunds

+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tiger Computing Ltd | Helping businesses make the most of Linux |
| "The Linux Company" | http://www.TheLinuxConsultancy.co.uk |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+

Jochem van Leeuwen <jochem < at > openhost.nl>
wrote the following on Sat, 20 Aug 2005 08:31:35 +0200

My question is pretty simple: Can I back up multiple directories
using rdiff-backup (if so, how?) or do I need to write a shell
script and loop trough a list of directories?

There's no direct way to backup multiple directories with a single
session of rdiff-backup. You can either run it twice, or backup the
higher directory. For instance, suppose you want to backup both
/home/alice and /home/bob to /backup. You could either:

rdiff-backup --include /home/alice --include /home/bob \
--exclude ** /home /backup

or mkdir /backup/alice and /backup/bob and then

rdiff-backup /home/alice /backup/alice
rdiff-backup /home/bob /backup/bob


--
Ben Escoto