Ubuntu
keep package

I wish to backup simply by copying files from a directory to another drive with the same directory name, but without the rdiff-backup format. Is this possible in keep?

Asked by Garry OConnell

I have a Windows (vfat) drive which contains only data (letters, spreadsheets,etc) collected over several years. Under Windows, I have created a complete copy of this drive on a second hard disk as backup. Under Windows, I regularly backup all (weekly), or portions (daily) of this drive to the second disk. When attempting to backup a single directory under "keep" as a test, I get an error about the target directory not appearing to be an "rdiff-backup" directory. Is it possible to just copy over older files, without any "rdiff" storage? Fiesty does not carry any help for "keep" to aid in learning this program. "Man keep" is also not sufficient to aid me in understanding what I can and can't do with "keep".Thanks in advance for any help here. "Keep" appears to be a good backup program for single user systems.

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Alan (mrintegrity) said : 		#1

I am not terribly familiar with keep but I do know that vfat doesn't support any sort of file permissions, this could definitely be part of the problem. What is the exact error message you are getting?

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Garry OConnell (garry4o) said : 		#2

The error returned was:

"
Fatal Error : Destination
directory /media/DATABACKUP/ExclHoldOO exists, but
does not look like a rdiff-backup directory. Running
rdiff-backup like this could mess up what is currently
in it. If you want to update or overwrite it, run
rdiff-backup with the --force option.
"

I do not wish to "mess up" the directory at this time. Also, it is doubtful that permissions are the problem, since I can open, change, and save documents there with the openoffice spreadsheet program. The changed document is still compatible with Excel from Office 97. I am converting from Windows to Linux, but want to be sure all I currently do in Windows is doable in Linux, before I drop Windows. I have converted most of the windows current documents to openoffice, but there are some other tasks to be cleared yet (including some compatible backup method, and keep looks like it should work well for that, if I can just get it to copy new and updated files to the backup drive without this rdiff-backup issue).

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Best Alan (mrintegrity) said : 		#3

You should make the backup from ubuntu on a seperate folder, xp backups and "keep" backups won't be compatible. keep does not simply copy the files and folders, instead it makes a "diff" or "difference" of what is missing from the backup compared to the files to be backed up then it only copies what is missing and it does this using compression.

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Garry OConnell (garry4o) said : 		#4

This answers the question, but not the way I would have hoped. I believe I will attempt to write some scripts to perform backups compatible with my current system. Thanks for the help.