Re: [rdiff-backup-users] rdiff-backup problems (FC4 -> VFAT)

[Wiebe Cazemier]

You can't backup the way you're doing now, by pointing inside dirs inside the 
dest-dir to backup to. Rdiff-backup is not rsync. What you want is something 
like this:

/usr/bin/rdiff-backup --exclude-special-files --no-hard-links -v4 / 
/your/destination/dir/mirror --exlude dir1 --exclude dir2

Things to exlude are "lost+found", "proc", "sys", "mnt" (probably), and so 
forth.

Why do you backup every system dir BTW if you're only concerned about the 
important data you mentioned? That is not located in /bin, I would suspect. I'm 
not saying it's wrong to backup system files, because when re-installing fedora 
core you can use your backed-up config files, for example, but going with your 
statement, it is kind of strange.

Talking about system backups BTW, in my opinion, rdiff-backup is not suitable 
for that, should you ever want to restore it. That has two main reasons. The 
first being that it checks the mtime of files and dirs to see if they have 
changed. This is good for user files, but not for system files. Package managers 
may restore old mtimes when doing certain maintainance jobs, to ensure the 
manager still knows what files belong to what installed package. The other being 
that rdiff-backup matches UIDs and GIDs against the /etc/passwd of the current 
system. So, if you're restoring a backup by means of a bootable CD, like 
Knoppix, all your (system) users will have UID's that don't match the system you 
backed up, but those of the boot CD. There is no way to override this behaviour.