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backup

My backup setup comprises:

• physically, a 1.5TB external hard drive connected via USB to one of my desktop machines


• configuration of UDEV to make the drive appear at a consistent place: /dev/backupdrive:
  edit /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules to add the line:
  BUS=="scsi", SYSFS{vendor}=="Maxtor", SYSFS{model}=="Basics Desktop", NAME{all_partitions}="backupdrive"
  then restart udev: /etc/init.d/udev restart


• to make things more interesting my backup drive is encrypted using dm-crypt, so the cryptsetup utility must be used to create a decrypted device on /dev/mapper/backupdrive,
• /dev/mapper/backupdrive is mounted at an appropriate mount point,

The above two steps are handled by a script which has to be run whenever the machine to which the drive is connected boots up. It could probably be integrated into an appropriate init.d/... script, though that would probably stall the bootup sequence until the decryption key had been entered to cryptsetup.


• the file /etc/cron.d/rsync_backup contains a cron directive to run a script once a day (in the middle of the night) which checks that the backup drive is actually mounted, produces some informative data which appears in the email message generated by the cron job, and runs the backup/snapshot script itself: rsync_backup_dowoy

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