Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Hidden directories are ignored during incremental backup

[Maarten Bezemer]

Hi,

> On 01/06/09 18:45, John covici wrote:
> > I think this is a problem in the fact that * never includes anything
> > beginning wth . character.  To do this, you need to back up a superior
> > directory to the Mail directory and that will work -- I do it all the
> > time.

If I look at the scripts, it seems that he is already starting the backup 
from /home/username/mail without using the * in the command line (which 
actually wouldn't make sense anyway).


On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Marcel (Felix) Giannelia wrote:
> A good way I've found to get the dot files without going up a directory 
> (sometimes you really don't want the extra directory level) is the pattern "* 
> .[^.]*", e.g.
>
> ls * .[^.]*
>
> will give you a list of all files and directories in the current dir, 
> including dot files but without "." and ".."  -- I learned the hard way that 
> ".*" is a very bad idea because it does match "." and ".." :)

That would be a bad idea, since it would not include a file named 
"..something". I've had users create files and directories with important 
stuff using such names, so that they would show up on top of the directory 
listing and be easy to find. So be careful with that!


Tijn, you talk about IMAP and maildir. Typically, ~/mail is used to store 
mbox files (containing lots of messages in one file), and ~/Maildir is 
used to store Maildir / Maildir++ format mailboxes (in which each email is 
a separate file).
So, please check your system to make sure you're not accidentally trying 
to backup the wrong mail location.

Furthermore, I just checked my own setup, and I don't see any hidden files 
go missing from the backup. I didn't need to do anything special to get it 
done this way.

I also noted that you use the '--create-full-path' parameter when starting 
the backup. Using it that way may with several paths in multiple runs may 
not do exactly what's expected.
Do you want your backups to look like:
/backup/snapshots/hourly/home/cybertinus/mail/home/cybertinus/mail/something?

Something you could do to find out exactly what rdiff-backup is doing, is 
adding a -v5 parameter to the command line, and see what it does. In the 
rdiff-backup-data you can also find session statistics files, mirror 
metadata files with information about every backed-up file, and a full 
backup log to browse through.

Hope this helps..

Regards,
Maarten