[TriLUG] Advice sought on Laptop backup

[Joel Ebel]

I'd recommend a push from the laptop so you can initiate it easily from 
the laptop.  Just a simple script to rsync the folders you want backed 
up would do the trick.  And you can either run it on your own or add a 
cron job to do it, but you'd have to remember that it would only work 
when the laptop was running and connected.  So you may have to do it 
manually on occasion.  If you aren't connected, the rsync would just 
fail.  I'd use something like:
rsync -avz --delete
for each folder you want backed up so what's on your server is identical 
to what's on your laptop for those folders.  You can add some excludes 
if you want to not back up some things inside those folders.  Then if 
you want to have some rolling hard links you can do all that on the 
server side against the rsync you just made.

Joel

Rick DeNatale wrote:
> I'd like to set up a process for backing my laptop up to my workstation/server.
> 
> The server is already doing scheduled rsync backups.  Right now I
> periodically backup to an NFS accessible directory on the server using
> rsync.  This directory then gets backed up in turn via the server's
> scheduled backups, which gives me a historical backup.
> 
> I'd like to make this more automatic (so that it actually gets done regularly.
> 
> Of course, if I initiate the backup from the  laptop this needs to be
> sensitive to whether or not the lan is actually accessible,
> alternatively if I pull from the server, the backup script or whatever
> needs to be sensitive to whether or not the laptop can be accessed.
> 
> If I'm on the road (which is rare these days) I'd also like to be able
> to manually control the backup over an ssh connection to the mother
> ship, which leads me to think that the push strategy would be better.
> 
> Any suggestions on the best way to accomplish this?  Are there any
> existing packages/solutions?
> 
> If not what's the best way to determine lan status?
> 
> The laptop is configured to use DHCP, and when at home, it gets my
> local nameserver. Currently I'm not dynamically updated the local DNS
> server, I just configure dhcpd to statically map hostnames and ip
> addresses to specific mac addresses.
> 
>>From the laptop I was thinking about a grep test on /etc/resolv to see
> if I am using the lan nameserver.  Is this reliable? Are there better
> ways?  Other alternatives might be grepping the output of either
> ping -c n,
> for some small n or
> dig server.local.domain
> 
> If I want to have the server find out whether the laptop is there
> what's the best way?
> 
> --
> Rick DeNatale
> 
> Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
> http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/