Back In Time

exclude other usb drives from backup

Asked by Michael Carr

Hello,
    I have used BIT on my main home computer with excellent results. However, I am trying to set up a backup system for my office computer in a multiple backup arrangement and I seem to be making backups of backups. The /dev/* exclusilon does not seem to exclude my second usb backup drive.
     Background: LinuxMint 17 32 bit Mate on AMD A8-6600K
     Backups include a daily complete backup to a USB3 drive partition: (3 physical drives, each partitioned into 2 250MB partitions i.e. Tuesday/Friday etc each associated with a weekly porfile such as Tuesday on Tuesday and Friday on Friday.)
     A second USB2 backup drive is set to do incremental backups early in the morning using the Main Profile.
     The idea is that I should always have at least one full backup off site along with the incremental drive always attached.
     Overnight, I have the USB2 drive as well as the 2 partitions on the USB3 drive. I want to exclude the second partition on the USB3 drive and the USB2 drive while I run the day of the week profile. Of course I also want to exclude the 2 USB3 partitions when I run the Main Profile incremental backup with the USB2 drive.
     What am I doing wrong? --Mike

Thank you Germar,
    I will try your suggestion tomorrow. I had looked in /mount/ but only found floppy, cdrom, etc. I will look under /mnt/ also.
In response to your question about the strategy I will try to make it more explicit. I have one USB2 drive which does the usual nightly incremental backup, but I also have 3 USB3 drives (each with 2 partitions). For example, this morning, a Tuesday, I brought in the USB3 drive with the Wednesday/Saturday partitions to replace the USB3 drive with the Tuesday/Friday partitions. If the office burns up with all my backup drives there, I still have the third USB3 drive with Monday/Thursday at home. I always have the day old backup at home.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Back In Time Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Germar (germar) said : 		#1

/dev is just the device. You need to exclude the mountpoint of your external drives. This is normally in /media or /mnt. So you would need to add /media/* and /mnt/* to exclude.

I don't exactly understand your backup strategy on that USB3 drive. But I think one profile for every weekday is a bit over the top. This will occupy the whole space seven times. The beauty of BIT is that you have both an incremental backup where only changed files will need additional space AND a full snapshot of all files which you can access even without BIT.

To make sure you don't get hit by corrupt files in snapshots you could periodically run with --checksum. Take a look at https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+faq/2445

Revision history for this message
Germar (germar) said : 		#2

Ah, okay. Now I understand your strategy. I think it would be easier with the same risk/security to have just one profile for all drives/weekdays and make sure, all drives mount at the same mountpoint (they must have the same folder structure, too). This way it doesn't matter which drive you bring in at morning (in case you forgot it at home) and BIT will just create a new snapshot with everything that has changed since the last one. No matter when the last snapshot was taken. You can still rotate the drive in the same way but you're not forced to it anymore.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Michael Carr for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.