backing up a laptop

[Net Llama!]

Bill Campbell wrote:
> There are several ways to do this, most have to do with networking unless
> you want to play with PCMCIA removable media, FireWire, or other goodies.

I'd prefer not to purchase any new hardware to do this.  If i'm going to 
go that route, i'd just purchase one of those laptop IDE converter 
things, and attach the drive to another box and copy everything over.

> Some possibilites, not in order of efficiency, but as I'm thinking of them:
> 
> NFS mount a directory on another machine, then use a command like this:

No NFS stuff installed on the laptop, and no NFS fileserver available to me.

> Use secure copy, scp, but I don't think it has the ability to
> restrict the copy to a single device as the ``-xdev'' option to
> find allows.

Not as far as I can tell, so i guess that rules out scp.

> Rsync is an excellent method although it might be a bit slow the first
> time, and it might run out of memory at some point.  It does have the
> ability to limit transfers to one file system.  It's also better to run
> rsync as a server on the remote system rather than use ssh assuming that
> you're on a reasonably secure network.  Assuming that you've set
> up the server, and have laptop_update defined in /etc/rsyncd.conf
> on that system:
> 
> 	cd /
> 	rsync -x -var --delete ./ ./boot remotesys::laptop_update
> 
> This will transfer only those files that have changed, deleting
> anything that's on the server, but not on the laptop.

This looks like it might work, although i'm a bit confused.  Is the 
above command for rsyncing from the laptop to the remote box, or vice-versa?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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