Back In Time

Stop at filesystem boundaries

Asked by Dave Vasilevsky

Is it possible to make backintime only back up a single filesystem, without crossing mountpoints? Rsync already has a flag for this, "--one-file-system". If this option was turned on, users would not have to individually exclude /proc, /sys, /dev, /mnt/*, /media/*, /tmp, and all the other locations that may be on a different file-system. Even if something was mounted in an unusual location, backintime would just Do The Right Thing and ignore it.

Another solution would be to attempt to auto-detect which filesystems the user might be interested in backing up. I would bet that most users are only interested in backing up filesystems backed by a physical disk of some sort. Loop mounts, network mounts, procfs/sysfs, and so on don't usually make sense to back up. So we could probably draw up a list of "interesting devices", and only include them: hd, sd, md; lvm partitions, etc.

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Dan (danleweb) said : 		#1

The problem is that BIT backup from root so if your home is on another partition ... your /home/user will not be backup.

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Tom Metro (tmetro+ubuntu) said : 		#2

I've ran into this issue as well for my personal home directory backup due to having mountpoints within my home directory. (Plus there is ~/.gvfs which links to network mounts in some versions of GNOME.)

At minimum limiting things to a single file system should be an option.

It's hard to say which state it should have by default to meet the expectations of a novice user. In the case of running as non-root, limiting to a single file system is almost always going to be the correct choice, and thus should be the default.

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