Vinnymcg

I'm looking for a program that will take a copy of my drive and store it on a network drive, preferably in a compressed format. The option to exclude certain folders is a must.

I am running ubuntu 8.10

Thanks in advance

lensman3

I use a program called "star" (for super-tar). It will exclude directories and does compression (zip, bzip2, etc). Also does incremental backups with the --wtardumps option and "level" option.

I have setup my system such that each partition is small (max 300 Gbytes) so that I can just backup a partition at a time an not a huge file system.

Here is an example of a command to backup across my network:

ssh root@gateway.bp 'star -c -xdev -sparse -acl -link-dirs level=0 -wtardumps -C /usr . ' | dd of=$save_file

I don't compress any longer because the compression takes so long. For the above line to work you have to setup ssh with no-password login. The command essential runs star on the remote host passing stdout through a pipe to the dd command running on the backup machine. The -xdev keeps the star on one partition only.

There is a small problem with the .gvfs directory. The "file" command can't even figure what kind of a file it is". This is created by gimp and even as super-user, the commands can't tell what kind of file type it is. This, to me, is a screw up by the gimp developers. There are work arounds, but they are a pain in the a**.

Hope this helps.

shuuhen

You can do that with tar, which is what I use for compressed backups. The man page (and maybe the info page) has the information about the arguments you'd need to pass to tar. What I'd use for options is something like:

tar cvj --exclude path/to/directory1 --exclude path/to/directory2 -f /path/to/network/share/backup.tar.bz2 /path/to/directories/to/backup/

With tar, it's best to use relative paths and run the command from the directory holding the directory you want to backup. If you give tar absolute paths (like /home/whoeveryouare/mystuff), that's where it will dump things to when you untar it. If you give it relative paths (if you're in /home/whoeveryouare/ give it mystuff/) it will dump those things relative to wherever you extract the files.

If you need a graphical program, you might look at KBackup. It's supposed to create the same files as tar would, so it might have the ability to exclude directories.

Vinnymcg

Thanks for all the info, KBackup looks like the best option for me.