Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Newbie Problems

[Thomas Harold]

On 10/23/2013 4:42 PM, Thomas H. George wrote:
> Three tries at backing up the root directory failed, each time ending
> with a lost connection message.

You may be getting some sort of timeout where the SSH session is being 
closed.

> The first two failures were to backup the entire desktop excluding /proc
> (167 Bb). The third excluded two large directories, /data (116 Gb) and
> /storage (18 Gb), as well as /proc.

/proc, /sys, /tmp, /lost+found should always be excluded (and possibly a 
few others like /var/tmp).

If you have a very large system, you probably want to backup parts of 
your system to different rdiff-backup target directories.  Such as 
backing up /home, /data and /storage separate from everything else.

> Next I tried backing up just /storage and this may have succeeded. After
> running for some time the root prompt reappeared, no messages, no
> statistics.  No rdiff-backup log in /var/log.  No session_statistic file
> that I can find.

By default, rdiff-backup does not print statistics unless you pass it 
the "--print-statistics" option.  The simplest form of the rdiff-backup 
command is therefore:

rdiff-backup --print-statistics ${BKPBASE}${DIR} 
${OFFHOST}::${OFFBASE}${DIR}

For example:

rdiff-backup --print-statistics /home/username 
servername::/backup/system-home/username/

This takes the contents of /home/username and backs them up to 
/backup/system-home/username on the "servername" computer.

Another good program to use is to run "atop" while the backup is 
running, this will show you disk/network/CPU activity and would tell you 
whether things are waiting on the CPU/disk/network.

> Any advice as to what might cause the desktop backup to fail?  Why no
> log file and no session_statistics?

An rdiff-backup target directory always has a directory named 
"rdiff-backup-data".  Inside of there is a file called "backup.log" that 
might have what you are looking for.