Back In Time

Don't backup if encrypted home is not mounted

Asked by schnollk

Hi there

and thanks for all your work so far!

I haven't used BIT for long but as I see it BIT doesn't recognize if my (encrypted) $HOME is not mounted (and thus more or less empty). Rather BIT see's my $HOME files as deleted. And when I log in (and therefor $HOME is decrypted and mounted on /home/$USER BIT takes a more or less complete snapshot.

I don't know if that makes any difference in disk size over time but rsync consumes much computation time and slows down my system.

What can I do to avoid BIT working more as needed (and not stay logged in and have my data decrypted all the time)?

Cheers

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Germar
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Germar (germar) said : 		#1

Hi,

you could run BIT as your user to backup your home. So it will only ran if you're logged in. You can keep using root for other folder which are not readable by user.

This definitely takes lots of space as your home will always be a complete new copy (not incremental with hard-links any more).

Regards,
Germar

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schnollk (schnollk) said : 		#2

Thanks for the quick reply. It's exactly my config. So maybe I just saw a regular new snapshot which should have been there anyway. I will see what happens. For clarity: Does BIT for user run via user's crontab, i.e. doesn't run because I'm not logged in or is the reason because cron cannot see my $HOME/.crontab (and therefore doesn't even start BIT)?

But as for encryption as I use encfs (not TrueCrypt or similar) data is stored in multiple small files (other than TrueCrypt). So in that case BIT shouldn't care, right? Also, I backup plain data (on a encrypted container) so I cannot see how encryption would make a difference at all?

Cheers.

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Best Germar (germar) said : 		#3

crontab will always start backintime (there is no $HOME/.crontab. This is done by root). But if you are logged out and your $HOME isn't mounted there is no $HOME/.config/backintime/config and so BIT will just exit with 'not configured' in that case.

Your encrypted files are in a different folder than the plain-text files. With ecryptfs (used in Ubuntu for encrypted $HOME) the encrypted version of your files is in /home/.ecryptfs/$USER/.Private/
If you are logged out the mountpoint $HOME is empty.

Kind regards,
Germar

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schnollk (schnollk) said : 		#4

thanks for that answer, germar!