backup

Backups are a must, specially before a OS upgrade.

To easily share the Linux configuration files (aka dotfiles) to other machines, I’ve followed the suggestion presented by the Atlassian tutorial how to store dotfiles. Now I have my .vimrc in a private github repo called cfg. It worked like a charm!

To backup other files to a external HD, I use rsync command to mirror the content of some folders from my PC into the external HD.

# Choose one of the following external HDs:
#HD="Seagate\ Expansion\ Drive"
HD="TOSHIBA\ EXT"
rsync -vaXmh --stats --delete /home/paulo/Documents/ "/run/media/paulo/$HD/paulo/Documents/"

A special comment about the flag --delete:

• This mirrors the files from the source folder (my PC, which holds the files to be backed up) to the destination folder (external HD).
• Files in the destination folder that differ from the source will be DELETED.
• Do not use this flag to back up folders where you don’t want to mirror (e.g., folder music in my PC have only a share of the files while the external HD has the whole collection).

The remaining flags have this meaning:

-v, --verbose
-a, --archive           archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
-r, --recursive         recursive
-l, --links             copy symlinks as symlinks
-p, --perms             preserve permissions
-t, --times             preserve modification times
-g, --group             preserve group
-o, --owner             preserve owner (super-user only)
-D                      same as --devices --specials
--devices               preserve device files (super-user only)
--specials              preserve special files
-X, --xattrs            preserve extended attributes
-m, --prune-empty-dirs  prune empty directory chains from file-list
-h, --human-readable    output numbers in a human-readable format