--link-dest

[Matt McCutchen]

Please consider copying the rsync list so that other people can help
you and so that your messages will be available to users who have
similar questions in the future.

On 1/5/07, tony.chamberlain at lemko.com <tony.chamberlain at lemko.com> wrote:
> rsnapshot seems to work pretty well for some things.  I have a question.
> Say I am on machine foo and
> want to put in my backup to bar
>
>
>     /home/chamberl/   backup at bar:chamberl/
>
> somewhere on backup it will make the chamberl directory.  On foo I have a
> snapshot_root so if i had done
> this locally it would put under $snapshot_root/chamberl/.
>
> So does this mean that on machine bar I need an rsnapshot.conf file with the
> snapshot root?  Or do i somehow have a
> remote snapshot root in the conf file on foo?  Or would it just go to a
> default directory on bar and I cannot specify
> a root?

Rsnapshot supports only local snapshot roots and only local backup
destinations within those snapshot roots.  A configuration line like
this will not work as you expect:

backup	/home/chamberl/	backup at bar:chamberl/

Thus, if you want the snapshot stored on bar, you need to run
rsnapshot *on bar* with an rsnapshot.conf giving the desired local
snapshot root.  So how do the files from foo get there?  If bar can
access foo via SSH, the easiest thing to do is to have bar pull the
files from foo by specifying a remote backup source:

backup	foo:/home/chamberl/	chamberl/

An alternative is to have foo push the files to a temporary area on
bar and then run rsnapshot to pick them up from there.  You could set
up your own temporary area and specify it as the backup source, or foo
could push the files directly to the .sync directory in the snapshot
root and rsnapshot could run in sync_first mode to convert that
directory to a snapshot.  A nice way to automate the process is to run
an rsync daemon on bar that accepts the pushed files into the correct
directory and calls rsnapshot as the post-xfer exec command.  Some
hints on how to do this are here:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2006-April/015347.html

Matt