Backup forum

speckle111 · 2022-05-20 16:03:42

I am running my first trial backup and already see a significant problem. IDrive is following soft links so that the folder that is linked is getting backed up. So, I have, in my home directory, links to folders in /mnt for convenience. My trial backup is /home which is relatively small, but it's telling me that the backup is 1.3 TB because it is putting a backup of the folders in /mnt that are linked. For example:

/home/john/movies -> /mnt/share/movies
/home/john/pictures -> /mnt/share/pictures

so the backup is trying to back up all the movies under /home/john/movies, etc.

I am going to backup /mnt as well, but (due to it's size) I'll do the initial backup via. express Drive, and I don't want two backups of everything in /mnt .

I tried excluding /home/john/movies , but I get the error that it is not a regular file, and it is removed from the exclude list.

I'm hoping (but not sure) that the backup does some smart deduplication so that the path /home/john/movies/Movie1.mp4 and /mnt/share/movies/Movie1.mp4 are both valid backup/restore points, but only one copy actually exists. If that's the case, it's not too big of a deal, but I'll wait until I've got my express Drive backup before continuing.

Can someone confirm that IDrive handles this correctly? Alternately, is there a way to exclude soft links from the backups?

speckle111 · 2022-05-20 16:11:25

Just found a (somewhat annoying) solution. I've included every file that is a soft link in the 'Partial file name' exclusion list.

So, I now have:

/home/john/movies

excluded as a partial path, not whole path, and now the backup size is down to a few GB as expected.

Not perfect because I now have to remember to add an exclusion every time I create a soft link, but at least I have a workaround.

Still interested in a better way to work with links though!

SteveA · 2022-05-21 00:05:09

I think you've found a reasonable solution.

I don't use the IDrive scripts to backup my Linux machines, I copy disk images and changes to a Windows machine and let IDrive back that up.

Has the advantage of having the latest versions of everything local so that I don't need to do a lengthy restore if I suffer a total loss of a machine.

I should point out that my Linux boxes don't contain TBs of movies and photos which is why this is viable for me.

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#1 2022-05-20 16:03:42

Linux soft links

#2 2022-05-20 16:11:25

Re: Linux soft links

#3 2022-05-21 00:05:09

Re: Linux soft links

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