rsbackup and Debian

The Debian package of rsbackup has some extra features. You could use these on other systems but on Debian they are set up to work automatically.

/etc/rsbackup/config

In the .deb package, the default /etc/rsbackup/config is as follows:

# Location of lockfile
lock /var/run/rsbackup.lock

# User configuration
include /etc/rsbackup/local

# Hosts
include /etc/rsbackup/hosts.d

Normally you would not edit this file. Instead, put local configuration in /etc/rsbackup/local and a file for each host to back up into /etc/rsbackup/hosts.d.

/etc/rsbackup/defaults

There is an extra configuration file for the cron jobs, /etc/rsbackup/defaults. The default is as follows:

#
# List hosts to backup hourly, daily, weekly and monthly
#  - set the empty string to back up no hosts (at that frequency)
#  - use the special string "_all" to back up everything
#
hourly=""
daily=_all
weekly=""
monthly=""

#
# Set report=hourly|daily|weekly|monthly to control frequency of
# email reports.  (Hourly is probably a bit much!)  Only effective
# if email is not "".
#
report=daily

#
# Set email=ADDRESS to have the report emailed to that address.
#
email=root

#
# Set prune=hourly|daily|weekly|monthly|never to control frequency of
# automated pruning of old backups
#
prune=daily

#
# Set prune_incomplete=hourly|daily|weekly|monthly|never to control
# frequency of automated pruning of incomplete backups
#
prune_incomplete=weekly

#
# Prefix to the rsbackup command
# Use 'nice' and/or 'ionice' here
#
nicely=

• hourly, daily, weekly and monthly define the hosts to back up at the given frequencies. You can set any (or all) of them to _all to back up all known hosts.

  Set them all to ""if you have some other arrangement for initiating backups.

  hourly is intended to be used to opportunistically back up hosts that are often down, for instance laptops and personal desktops. weekly and monthly are appropriate for hosts that almost never change.

• Set email to the destination address for reports from the daily backup run, or comment out the line entirely to suppress email reports. If you want reports at some other frequency than daily, modify report.

• Modify prune to control the frequency of pruning of old backups. It is recommended to leave this as daily, since deleting a week or more’s worth of backups takes a very long time.

• Modify prune_incomplete to control the frequency of deleting incomplete backups. It is recommended to keep this at a lower frequency than you take backups, as otherwise rsync will not be able to use incomplete backups to optimize new ones.

• Modify nicely to control the priority of rsbackup. For example, you might use:

  nicely="nice ionice -3"