You can actually have this drive off-site and use ssh, but that will be a tutorial for another day! Change this to whatever your backup location is. /media/HomeBackup is the separate drive.home copies the directory and its contents, /home/ would just copy the contents. gvfs directory in Hardy Heron was a pain, as even with sudo it errored and wouldn't copy properly, so I excluded it (Its not necessary to copy it anyway) If you don't use Hardy yet, or any distro using the latest Gnome, skip this line, or upgrade! -exclude leaves out any files or directories you don't want copied.-log-file saves a copy of the rsync result to a date-stamped file on my desktop.-delete checks for changes between source and destination, and deletes any files at the destination that you've deleted at the source.-progress gives you more specific info about progress.The 'v' is verbose, so it tells you what its doing, either in the terminal, in this case, in the log file. the -av bit: 'a' means archive, or copy everything recursively, preserving things like permissions, ownership and time stamps.Sudo rsync -av -progress -delete -log-file=/home/your-username/Desktop/$(date +%Y%m%d)_rsync.log -exclude '/home/your-username/.gvfs' /home /media/HomeBackup While it was fun for me, others may just want to know how to do it immediately. I spent ages doing research into the various commands, and found everything I needed to know, but not all in the same place. I wanted to backup my home directory using rsync to a separate drive, and to make it happen automatically. Thanks to Daniel for providing this tutorial. You can see the potential for these three programs to work together to provide automated backups!

And Cron is a Linux program that schedules programs to run, based on time. Bash is a scripting language for Linux that allows you to automate the commands you run in the command line. Rsync is a command line program for Linux that performs a backups. Originally published as a tutorial on the Linux Basement site, Daniel thought that our listeners and readers might find it valuable as well, since we discussed Linux backup applications in Episodes 29 and 31. Automating backups using rsync, bash and cron Updated: 1Ī listener to the Going Linux podcast, Daniel, has contributed this article for us to publish.

Rsync backup script