Comments on: Debian / Ubuntu Linux Install and Configure Remote Filesystem Snapshot with rsnapshot Incremental Backup Utility

By: justin

justin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:04:58 +0000

Riger:
how about:

sudo rsnapshot hourly

By: Riger

Riger — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:54:47 +0000

Also, when I was connected, something happened in the transmission and my network card disconnected.

Now whenever I run the:

rsnapshot hourly

command to test, I keep getting this error:

ERROR: Could not write lockfile +"/var/run/rsnapshot.pid"

There is no file by this name and I cannot find any online resource to fix this issue. So it seems there is a serious weakness in this – Meaning if the connection gets broken, they the system also breaks?

Sorry, I’d appreciate anyone who knows how to fix this. :)

THANK YOU!

By: Riger

Riger — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:16:58 +0000

When I run:

rsnapshot hourly

I still have to enter the root password on the remote server (WHM/cPanel).

I checked and the remote server does have my public key and it is also authorized.

Where in the local script can I try to force rsnapshot/rsync to use the ssh key? Maybe that’s the issue?

I really hope someone can help thanks.

After manually logging in the rsnapshot does work, so the only sticking point (for me) is to get the automated ssh key login to be used.

Thanks for any help!

By: uid0

uid0 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:39:49 +0000

Ok, what if you configure your backup server as a raid5, how much different would this set up?

Furthermore, i want to be able to mount an external tape drive to the back up server, so to store to tape the back up media.

Thanks.

By: Klas Wirholm

Klas Wirholm — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:33:54 +0000

Looks like it functions know. I just changed the line in fstab to:
/dev/sdc1 /media/usb_backup auto rw,user,auto 0 0

So the problem occured when I had noauto, like this:

/dev/sdc1 /media/usb_backup auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

Can that bee true, that the disk whasnt mounted at al becourse of that (trying to learn al about linux)?

Thanks for your help!

By: vivek

vivek — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:06:09 +0000

Klas,

Are you sure your usb hard disk mounted at /media/usb_backup? Use df or mount command to verify the same. df will also give out information about used disk space.

By: Klas Wirholm

Klas Wirholm — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:09:37 +0000

I’m doing a backup to an external usb drive who I mounted in fstab like this:

/dev/sdc1 /media/usb_backup auto rw,user,auto 0 0

I get an error that the disk is full when I do my second backup. It looks like rsnapshot thinks that the catalog where the partion is mounted is the messure of who big the backup can bee.The usb drive is 250 Gb and my main partion where I mount it is (root) is 39Gb.

How do I solve this?

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:03:19 +0000

Another good tool to look at is rdiff-backup (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/). It keeps a full copy of the current version of each file, with a diff of changed files. If you have a large file that changes a little at a time, you will use even less disk space than with rsnapshot.

By: vivek

vivek — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:56:43 +0000

Scott,

Good suggestion. I’m adding additional content to this FAQ including your exclude_file and mysql backup issue.

By: Scott Carlson

Scott Carlson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:03:32 +0000

Also, I use a script around rsnapshot that helps cut out a lot of my unneeded files from being backed-up. (Think cache files, or rapidly changing files like history in eclipse)

In rsnapshot.conf I have “exclude_file /var/backups/snapshot/excludefile.txt”

Then my script does a
find /home/user1/ -xdev -name .nobackup -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 dirname > $EXCLUDEFILE
cat /home/user1/.backupexcludes >> $EXCLUDEFILE

So this first uses the hdup style .nobackup flag files to ignore whole directories. This works pretty well, except for directories that get deleted like firefox cache directories. Those I put in the .backupexcludes file.

I do a similiar thing for the remote servers I backup.