Simple guy, simple backup needs. Hopefully simple backup problem to fix

[userzero]

Hi All,

I'm running one Debian Testing machine at home. Its just me, my wife and my son here- not an enterprise-level situation. I want to find a back up solution that:

1) Backs up to the Cloud like Google Drive
3) Can back up my entire /home directory instead of just my user directory
4) Can be automated so I don't have to back up manually
5) Hopefully a client-side app that will run in the back ground and do incremental backups.

I've tried to set up rclone to use with Google Drive but have had trouble getting it to work. Too bad, seems like a good way to go. I've been using SpiderOakOne but have been having problems with it lately. Can someone please offer me some advice to help point me in the right direction? Any/all help will me much appreciated.

Take Care,

Chris

 

[Rob]

Hey there Chris - welcome to the site!

Are you married to google drive? I've backed up to S3 (aws) before with good results - you can mount s3 using fuse, then just rsync the files to it.

I haven't looked into google drive sync in a while, but I do pay for a bunch of space, so maybe I should look back into it now - let's see if anyone knows about a good way to get things up there.

 

[userzero]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the reply! I just watched a great tutorial yesterday on rsync and would love to put what I've learned to use. I'm certainly not married to Google and would be fine with S3. Now I just need to learn how to do it. I could set up a cron job for rsync I guess and use fuse to send my files to Amazon backup? I'll check out YouTube and Google it to see if someone can walk me through it. Thanks again!

-chris

 

[jglen490]

Any particular reason for cloud backup?

Personally, I avoid cloud applications as much as possible. I'd rather keep my data closer to home. But, I do use rsync and a rotating set of external USB hard drives for my backup soluiton.

 

[userzero]

Hi Guys,

Yeah, I live in California earthquake country. I want at least one of my backups to be remote. I finally got rclone to mount my Google Drive account. I have lots of space for a data dump. I'll use cron to set up an rsync job to back up my files. Sounds to me like it should work. We'll see. This will be my first shot at this. Wish me luck!

 

[Condobloke]

Good Luck !!!!

 

[jglen490]

Yep, rsync will work in almost any situation where you can address the location of the target drive. I understand your concern about natural disasters, and if you choose the cloud, then I hope it works out for you!

 

[HaxNet]

Chris - I sent you a PM.

I also found a workaround, but it's the best way to store things. It is using GitHub.

 

[userzero]

Chris - I sent you a PM.

I also found a workaround, but it's the best way to store things. It is using GitHub.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm bound and determined though to do this via rclone and rsync.

Take Care,

chris

 

[userzero]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm slowly but surely working my way through this. Here's what I have:
1. rclone successfully mounts my Google Drive and I can now navigate that remote drive from my local machine.
2. I'm going to use rsync to do an initial backup of certain directories and then schedule a cron job for rsync to do incremental backups to Google Drive periodically.

Currently I'm trying to get rclone to auto-mount to Google Drive at system startup but am having some trouble. I put this command in /etc/init.d:

rclone mount --allow-non-empty Polaris: /mnt/Polaris ("Polaris" is my mount directory point in /mnt)

When I run this command manually from the command line it mounts successfully.
I placed that command in an executable file in /etc/init.d and then created a soft link to it in /etc/rc3.d
like this:

ln -s ../init.d/mount-remote S01mount-remote

Again, the file is executable via chmod 755 and resides in /etc/init.d:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 53 Apr 1 16:11 mount-remote

I restart the system and run the "mount" command and don't see it listed. Again, if I just run the command manually, "mount" shows that it is indeed mounted. I'm not sure what I'm missing here. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks Much!

-chris