[rdiff-backup-users] backup via filelist?

[Michael Hannon]

Hi, folks.  We're trying to do a disk-to-remote-disk backup with
rdiff-backup.  We need to backup 600-700GB the first time through.
We've attempted the backup a couple of times, and it has failed both
times, after transferring about 400GB and 450GB, respectively.

I'm leery of just trying to cram more files onto a failed backup, even
though rdiff offers to let me do that via the "force" option (IIRC).  It
seems to me that the bookkeeping data is vitally important.

In any case, I had the bright idea of including only a few new
directories at a time in the rdiff-backup until such time as we had
successfully backed up all the directories at least once.  After that I
figured the backups would reduce essentially to incremental backups, and
we could just include everything in every backup.

To test this idea, I thought I would start by backing up a single
directory, as:

    /usr/bin/rdiff-backup                         \
    --include-filelist /usr/local/bin/rd-filelist \
    --exclude '**'                                \
    /home                                         \
    address@hidden::/backup/rdiff-guy/original-server-name/home

The file /usr/local/bin/rd-filelist currently contains only a single
line:

    /home/first-user

This is all with rdiff-backup 1.0.5 on a Redhat Enterprise 5 system, by
the way.

What I HOPED this would do was to backup ALL of the files belonging to
"first-user" and none of the other files in /home.  Then, if that worked,
I'd expand the list to:

    /home/first-user
    /home/second-user

and so on, until after all the *-user files had been copied, after which
I'd throw out the filelist option and just backup /home.

What ACTUALLY happens is that the appropriate directory:

    /backup/rdiff-guy/original-server-name/home/first-user

does get created, but there are no files in it!  In fact, "first-user"
has about 1.2GB of files in /home/first-user on the original server.

I am evidently confused about the syntax (or worse) here.  Can somebody
help?

Thanks.

                                        - Mike