Trying to backup /Home, but it is trying to copy 30X as much data

**jimmy the saint** · January 1st, 2011

My /Home is 8 Gigs (after a LOOONG purging process).

I am trying to back it up to do a fresh install and it is preparing to move 250+ Gigs of data! WTF? I don't have that much free space on my backup drive, so it is failing.

What can I do here?

Thanks

Edit: Now it's saying it needs to copy about 8 Terabytes! WTF is going on here?

Edit2: Now its 200 Terabytes!

Edit 3: Now its up to 234,000 Terabytes!

**jimmy the saint** · January 1st, 2011

This is nuts

**AlphaLexman** · January 1st, 2011

Where are you backing up to?
It is possible to create an infinite loop during a backup... i.e. the backup file is being backed up!

**jimmy the saint** · January 1st, 2011

That's kind of what I thought, but I tried to back it up to a remote server, then to a 32 Gig Thumb Drive, then to a 1.5 TB External drive.

I'm going to try to do it from a live CD and see what happens. Most bizarre thing that's happened to me yet.

Apparently Google should rent some storage space on my crappy laptop. I've got room to spare!

**AlphaLexman** · January 1st, 2011

post your backup script or terminal entry

**jimmy the saint** · January 1st, 2011

No terminal entry. Just drag and drop.

The Live CD is working. Still a little over double the reported size, but 17 Gigs can be copied to an external drive.

262 petabytes would strain my budget this soon after Christmas!

**AlphaLexman** · January 2nd, 2011

You should look into 'rsync'

**tgalati4** · January 2nd, 2011

Perhaps you are trying to backup the entire internet?

Do you have any symbolic links or remote disk mounts in your home folder? Perhaps a music directory on another machine?

"I'm gonna need a bigger disk . . ."

**stmiller** · January 2nd, 2011

Yep - this won't work as it tries to infinitely copy hidden files and sym links.

Do something like this:

Code:

rsync -a /home/username /media/backupdrive

**jimmy the saint** · January 8th, 2011

Thanks guys. Next time, I'll do this. I didn't really put much thought into it, as it was kind of a spur of the moment decision to travel with a fresh installation.