How to handle external drives which may or may not be present

Asked by Warren Baird

I'm currently using deja-dup to backup to a hard drive I keep at home. I also have an external hard drive at work I'd like to backup to. Since deja-dup only supports one target drive, I'm looking at using Back In Time to do backups on the drive at work.

However, the external drive at work is connected to my dock, and I'm regularly docking and undocking all the time during the day as I go to rooms for meetings. There's no particular times that I know I will be at my desk.

What is the recommended way to configure Back In Time in a situation like this? I assume that the backup will just fail if it can't find the target drive?

It looks like deja-dup triggers a check when a new HD is available, and if it is the backup drive, *and* if a backup hasn't been done in a certain period of time, then it starts a backup - is there a way to do the same with BIT?

Thanks!

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Germar
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Germar (germar) said :
#1

There is no option for this by now. But you can build this by your own with udev. Take a look at http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

You can start a new snapshot as soon as the drive is available. You may want to combine this with my answer in http://askubuntu.com/a/334599/37580 to only run this once a day.

Regards,
Germar

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Germar (germar) said :
#2

Just to let you know: I started working on udev rule shedules (start snapshot as soon as the drive is connected). I can not promise it will make it into next release. It's quite complicate and we will need to release soon because of a bug in Kubuntu 13.10

Regards,
Germar

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Best Germar (germar) said :
#3

Hi,

The udev schedule is included in 1.0.28 release. If you select 'When drive get connected (udev)' as schedule Backintime will make a new snapshot as soon as you connect your drive but only once every x days. Backintime will ask you for 'sudo' permission to set up the udev rule.

Regards,
Germar

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Warren Baird (wjbaird) said :
#4

Thanks Germar! That's very good news. I'll check it out as soon as I get the chance. Is there a PPA for Ubuntu that will get me the most recent version? what I seem to have with Ubuntu 13.10 is 1.0.10-1.

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Warren Baird (wjbaird) said :
#5

Thanks Germar, that solved my question.

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Germar (germar) said :
#6

You can use 'ppa:bit-team/stable'