external drive as source - set to only backup when mounted?

Asked by tom

SETUP
Source drive: external firewire ext4
Destination drive: internal, ext4, a partition mounted at ~/myData/digiDrive
Profile: set to backup every 10 minutes, other settings at default.
BiT version 1.0.10 (from debian’s wheezy main repository)

PROBLEM
As long as the source is always mounted, the automatic backups work perfectly.
But...
If the source drive happens to NOT be mounted, BiT makes a snapshot with no files in it.
When source drive is remounted, BiT then winds up making a full backup.

CURRENT WORKAROUND
I have to be sure my source drive is always mounted.
But if I forget, and BiT makes blank snapshots, I have to delete the blank snapshots back to the last time the drive was mounted, so that the next incremental backup is small.

QUESTION
Is there a way to setup BiT so that it will do automatic backups, but avoid making snapshots when the source drive isn’t mounted?

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Germar (germar) said :
#1

There is no such function in 1.0.10 nor current version 1.0.34. But with next major version BIT will check returncode of the user-callback script and stop taking a snapshot if it's not 0. So you could just check if your src is mounted and return 1 if not.

At the moment you could only kill the parent of the parent process in user-callback script. Take a look at https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/242730

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tom (chewywater) said :
#2

This is exactly what I needed to know.
Thanks so much Germar.

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