To my surprise, my laptop has become my primary computer. With my old Fujitsu and my Macbook, I still made a remote connection to my desktop and worked there. However, with my Thinkpad, I have finally found a laptop that I am happy with, I think it is down to the quality of the keyboard. Working locally means I need to back the system up.
I have to admit that I put it off back-ups as I was waiting to find the time to learn a specialised backup program, which I still will learn soon. This week I decided that in the meantime, I will backup to an external drive that I had lying around.
I started by creating a new encrypted partition on the external device:
sudo cryptsetup luksFormat -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 /dev/sdb1
Read my recent series on encryption for more details on that.
Then I unlocked the partition:
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 backup
Then I created a filesystem:
sudo mkfs.reiserfs /dev/mapper/backup
The next step was mounting the filesystem somewhere:
mount /dev/mapper/backup backup-disk
Then I headed over to the mountpoint:
cd backup-disk
Lastly, I copied my home directory here:
rsync -avzt /home/user ./
I saved a script that has some of the above commands (skip lines 1 and 3), rsync will only copy the changes, making the process very quick.
<p>Nice to see some writing again! I was beginning to think you'd dun run off
with that cute mid-eastern girl. <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/wink.png"></p>
<p>I've always used tar for backup but after looking at your line, I discovered
that rsync compresses too! Also I learned that rsync includes --exclude=
just like tar and putting in --delete removes the destination file if has
been removed from source. Who know I possibly will start using it.</p>
<p>Hmmm ... I have been rsync for a long time just to do back ups, but be aware that if you put the --delete option, and have a nice cron to do your backup, and you actually do a:
rm -rf /home/kewlmyst/important_stuff/
and your little cron does it's job ... you have also lost your 'important stuff' on the backup.
@dirk: the -z option compresses the network flow, but not the actual data strored on the remote location/disk.</p>