misc newbee questions

[Ben Escoto]

--==_Exmh_-1940508508P
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

>>>>> "JA" == Johan Aberg <johan.aberg@fido.se>
>>>>> wrote the following on Fri, 25 Jan 2002 23:59:00 +0100

  JA> Hi!  Some things I've run into:

  JA> I want to backup once an hour all files that ends with .mb, .ma,
  JA> .aep. Is there a way I can tell rdiff-backup to do only do that?

Not really.  Soon (next version?) rdiff-backup will be able to read a
list of files to backup.  Now you can exclude files using regular
expressions, but the problem is with directories.  If you back up /foo
and exclude anything not ending in .mb, then you will miss
/foo/bar/baz.mb, because /foo/bar doesn't end in .mb.

  JA> Is cron the way to go when using rdiff-backup automaticly?

That's how I use it, but there are probably other possibilities.

  JA> I've tried to run rdiff-backup through remote access. Like this:
  JA> rdiff-backup /some/local-dir hostname.net::/whatever/remote-dir

  JA> I have to manually enter the password for root. I just can't get
  JA> ssh to automaticly enter the password. Does anyone have a good
  JA> howto page to point me to to help me get this to work.

Check out the man pages for ssh-add and ssh-agent; these tools are the
usual way of holding passwords in memory for multiple uses.  If that
isn't convenient enough for you, check out the "keychain" tool which,
at the cost of some security, automates the process further so you
almost never have to type a password in.  If you are not using RSA/DSA
keys you may have to hack together an expect script.

  JA> Only if I do the remote option, rdiff is used when doing
  JA> backups, is that right? If I've mounted the directory with NFS
  JA> that I want to backup, rdiff-backup will not be as efficient,
  JA> not doing this rdiff thing? Have I got it right?

It always uses rdiff to write the diffs in the rdiff-backup-data
directory.  If you are using it remotely it will also use rdiff-backup
to update files so that large files that change a little bit will not
be transmitted over the network (only the differences will be).  So
I'd imagine that rdiff-backup would be faster and more bandwidth
efficient using the remote option than if you ran it on one system
using NFS.


--
Ben Escoto

--==_Exmh_-1940508508P
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh version 2.5 01/15/2001

iD8DBQE8Ue1a+owuOvknOnURAsJhAJ9iSqY2H2923P18MQWGEQpgUqL0wACeNtxX
g1ylBAr3kfPcLM3R8odFnH0=
=lFhe
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--==_Exmh_-1940508508P--