I've been backing up data for years now.
When I was in Windows, I did it by burning CDs... lots of CDs.
Finally, my wife and I invested in an external hard drive--what a life saver. I could back up 30 or 40 GB of data without having to burn 50 CDs. How did I back stuff up? Copy and paste. Sure, it took a long time, but that seemed fine.
Later, after moving on to Ubuntu, I still did the copy and paste for quite a while.
I toyed with a few GUI programs for backing up, but they always seemed convoluted to me, for some reason.
Then, I tried just .tarring my files with a script that I saved to /usr/local/bin and called backupfiles. I liked the script. It was fun, but it still took a hell of a lot of time to copy all those files.
Finally, I read an article about rsync. I'd read numerous times on these forums that rsync was great... usually accompanied by vague instructions likeI have to say I really despise the acronym RTFM (read the f'in manual)--not so much because of its rudeness but because of its presumptuousness and false assumptions... namely that reading the manual actually helps new users.Try rsync
I didand my eyes glazed over. "Yeah... so..? How do I use it?" The article in the news explained it all quite nicely, even to a semi-beginner like me.Code:man rsync
So I used rsync with the -av options:and it took quite a while, but when I did it again, only my Firefox profile (which I had modified slightly since) was backed up.rsync -av /old/directory /backup/directory
The beauty of rsync is its being a single command that does not require root privileges, preserves links, and does differential/incremental backups. I was so won over by rsync that I even converted my wife over to it to use on her Mac Powerbook.
One thing that I found out the hard way, though--don't use rsync on FAT32. It's got to be Ext3 or HFS+.
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