cool... thanks.
:-)~MIKE~(-:


On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net>wrote:

> > Brian Cluff wrote:
> >> In a nutshell, I hope you have a backup of it somewhere because if not,
> >> it's pretty much gone.
>
> MAKING BACKUPS EASY ON LINUX:
>
> 0. Buy a USB2 disk that has enough space to hold all the stuff in your home
> dir plus at least a few G more (data tends to get bigger with time, of
> course)
>
> 1. Plug this disk in.  Usually, removable disks have 1 partition of type
> FAT32
> or NTFS covering their whole space.  (Check that this is the case, if not,
> something weird may be going on.)
>
> 2. Make a filesystem with a label on this partition.  "mke2fs -j -L
> MY_BACKUPS
> /dev/sdN1" .  Find what N is by looking at the output of dmesg | tail.
>
> 3. Make an entry for the partition you made in your /etc/fstab :
>
> LABEL=MY_BACKUPS  /mnt/backup  ext3  noauto,users,noatime  0  0
>
> 4. As root, mkdir /mnt/backup if it doesn't exist, then mount this
> partition
> on /mnt/backup , mkdir /mnt/backup/USER , and chown USER /mnt/backup/USER .
>
> 5. Make a shell script sort of like this:
>
> #!/bin/bash
> if [[ $1 == '--help' || $1 == '-h' ]] ; then
>     echo "backs up ~USER to backup drive."
>     exit;
> fi
>
> if mount | grep /mnt/backup > /dev/null ; then
>     rsync -av --delete-after /home/USER/ /mnt/backup/USER
> else
>     echo "backup disk not mounted.  Trying to mount it."
>     mount /mnt/backup
>     if mount | grep /mnt/backup > /dev/null ; then
>          echo "Is the disk plugged in?  Can't mount, bailing."
>          exit 1
>     fi
>     rsync -av --delete-after /home/USER/ /mnt/backup/USER
>     umount /mnt/backup
> fi
>
> 6. Any time you want to make a backup, plug your disk in, and run that
> shell
> script.  The initial rsync will take some time.  Subsequent rsyncs will
> take a
> couple of minutes.
>
> This is AFAICT a reasonably good way to do things, because it doesn't take
> a
> lot of time to keep your backup up to date, and restoring is as simple as
> mounting the backup disk and copying things over.  Since there is only 1
> backup, though, you could delete something, make a backup, then realize you
> needed that thing.  I have 2 backup disks and rotate them every few days to
> make that less likely.
>
> You could even get fancy and use dm-crypt to back up your stuff to an
> encrypted disk, which is useful in some situations like when you want to
> leave
> the disk somewhere that's not under your direct control like a friend's
> house.
>  Using dm-crypt makes things a bit more complex, but I can write another
> message about that.
>
> --
> Matt G / Dances With Crows
> The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
> There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
>
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