I want to add $HOME/.ssh and $HOME/.thunderbird as backup paths. But the Linux client GUI “add path” dialog box doesn’t appear to allow me to choose a dot-directory (it doesn’t display them). And I can’t find a way to tell that dialog box to display hidden directories.
How do I do this?
Thanks in advance!
On the sever web gui put in: setting -> file backup tab :
folder to backup
/home
backup file only
/home/:/.ssh/;/home/:/.thunderbird/
Maybe re-add the other folder you did set on the client.
another option :
Look at the agent config file , but didn’t looked into this too much.
another option :
Look at urbackupagentctl help:
urbackupclientctl set-settings --help
urbackupclientctl add-backupdir --help
Thanks for the reply, I’ll look into those ideas. I am also investigating UrBackup’s concept of “virtual clients”.
What I really prefer to do, is not to ADD directories (like the invisible ones I asked about), but to EXCLUDE certain directories. This is much better because new things are going to be backed up by default, UNLESS you exclude them. However, I only found one place to define exclusions for a client. And I only wanted to exclude something in one backup path but not in another backup path (both paths being on the same client). I couldn’t see how to do that, so I ventured down the INCLUDE way of doing things rather than the EXCLUDE. I didn’t like that method much. But now that I noticed the “virtual client” part of UrBackup, I think that will solve my problem.
For example, I have a directory /media/videos. Then in /home/userid I have a symlink that creates a “/home/userid/videos” directory that points to /media/videos. So when backing up the /home/userid path, I want to exclude “videos”. But when backing up the /media path, I do not want to exclude “videos”. I did not see how to do this using the exclude method. If I excluded “videos” in one path, it would also be excluded in the other path. So I tried using multiple backup paths like /home/userid/A, /home/userid/B, /home/userid/C, etc. and I would just not create a path for /home/userid/videos. That worked, but then I ran into the issue of not knowing how to specify a backup path for a dot-directory.
The subdirectories that I want to exclude from backup when doing /home/userid are all symlinks, and the easiest way to accomplish my goal would be to instruct UrBackup “do not follow symlinks”. But I couldn’t find any way to specify that either. That would be the ideal setting for my situation, if it were possible to configure that in UrBackup.
In case you’re wondering why I have all these symlinks in my $HOME directory, it’s because I keep the computers OS and much of my $HOME on an SSD. But huge things like videos, music, photos, etc. are relegated to an HDD because they don’t need the speed of SSD, and SSD space is premium priced compared to HDD space. So I symlink these huge things on HDD back to my $HOME directory on SSD for convenient access.
It looks like if I define backup paths from the client command line (not the GUI), there are options to “urbackupclientctl add-backupdir” that allow me to define exactly what I want, namely, “do not follow symlinks”. Specify that with “–no-follow-symlinks” or shorthand “-f”. Someday, in software Utopia, it would be nice if software GUI’s would support all the same functions as the command line, but that’s never the case, in other software besides UrBackup as well.
Related, the help message for “urbackupclientctl set-settings” tells you you can set variables with -v or -k, but it doesn’t tell you what the allowable variable names are, what their allowable values are, or what they do.The best I’ve found, by snooping around my system, is the file /usr/local/var/urbackup/data/settings.cfg. I assume this is the file that “urbackupclientctl set-settings” edits. You can see some variable names in that file. Not clear to me, is how virtual clients would use this. Do they add separate sections to this one file? Do they create multiple settings.cfg files?
The section of the Administration Manual says this about virtual clients:
Virtual sub clients allow you to have different file backup sets with one client. Once you specify virtual sub clients, multiple clients will appear with the name “clientname[subclientname]”.
That sounds very useful to me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you WHERE you “specify virtual sub clients”.
Is this stuff I’m asking about documented somewhere?