[vox-tech] Utility to image a hard drive

[Alex Mandel]

Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Alex Mandel (tech_dev at wildintellect.com):
> 
>> There's also a text based tool called backup ninja which writes the
>> rsync scripts for you and several rysnc gui's to help teach you the
>> syntax which can be tricky, grsync.
> 
> I have to admit, I really don't get this -- but, on the other hand,
> haven't tried 'em.  Plain old rsync always struck me as blessedly simple.  
> "rsync -avz olddirectory newdirectory" Just Plain Works -- and
> generalises to 
> "rsync -avz olddirectory username at newhost:newdirectory" for network 
> copying (esp. if you set RSYNC_RSH=/usr/bin/ssh).
> 
> There are options you use rarely, such as:
> 
>     --delete   #Update destination dirs to remove files no longer needed
>     --exclude=PATTERN
>     --exclude-from=FILE
> ...but I need those only rarely, and look 'em up when I do.
> _______________________________________________

For those of us not blessed with the gift of CLI, commands like rsync
can be a little rough to get the hang of and in the case of backup
--exclude=PATTERN is actually a must unless you've got unlimited space.
And since we're not blessed by the CLI gods the PATTERN matching isn't
that straightforward either.
Also we're talking recursing into many nested subdirectories and from
several different places on the origin disk. It can easily add up to a
page of different rsync commands.

Then you run into the debate about versions, and whether to only keep
one version. Simple backup makes it easy to do progressive backups, 1
per year(older than 1 year), 1 per month, 1 per week for current month
and it manages it all for you. In reality it's a gui to a bunch of cron
rsync commands.

Which brings up the idea that some stuff may be under version control
and you want to skip those folder as the backup of the repository is
more useful.

I could go on, but I think I've said enough,
Alex