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Carlos Vega
Asked: 2016-04-20 02:52:39 +0800 CST

Full system backup with rsync

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I was reading this article about how to do a full system backup using rsync. This article assumes you have another machine with a similar linux system. What if is not the case? How different would be the procedure in order to do a full machine backup (including other mounted drives) in a way that if my hard drive breaks, I would just need to boot from my external backup drive?

I'm not sure about the excluding patterns used.

Thanks in advance.

backup linux rsync

2 Answers

  1. Preface:

    Backups should always be

    • offsite
    • offline/read-only
    • redundant.

    If you just use an external hard disk connected eg. via USB, you dramatically reduce the amount of protection your backup can offer against

    • catastrophic damage like theft, fire, flooding etc.
    • user and or software error leading to deleted data on connected drives, inlcuding your backup drive
    • ransomware encrypting your data, including backups to force you to pay in order to decyrpt.

    In summary, such a backup is nearly worthless if it's the only backup. Do this only as a secondary backup for fast recovery in case of hardware damage.

    About the actual question:

    These instructions are really old. You should find more current documents. That said, the exclude rules will be essentially the same, except you have to also exclude the mount point of your backup drive for the local backup.

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  2. Best Answer

    I opted for doing a first dd and then use rsync in order to update the backup. The dd does a perfect copy of the system including fstab as well as the boot stuff. Rsync will keep the copy updated and include the mounted drives.

    dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdg bs=4M

    Replace source and destination drives accordingly.

    The rsync procedure will be exactly the same as explained in this article.

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