On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:53 PM, ken gebser@mousecar.com wrote:
Les, thanks for replying. Yeah, I guess I need to clarify.
I've got a system which is due for an upgrade and, at the same time, would like to clean up (delete) files and, in some instances, entire directories. Insurance against sudden disk failure is one other concern.
As a special-case 'restore from scratch' backup, look at clonezilla-live (a bootable iso) or ReaR (a package you can run while the machine is still working). Either of these will make a backup copy that you can restore on bare metal and are good to use before big changes for a quick way to recover from any mistake.
If I delete files and entire directories on that (source) machine, will rsync then subsequently automatically delete them on the destination (backup) system?
If you do a simple rsync, you can add the --delete option to tell it to delete files on the destination if they don't exist in the source. You can use rsync -avn --delete ... to see what will happen if you aren't sure about the source/dest args (-n = --dry-run so it won't actually do anything), then repeat without the -n to do it.
I remember you speaking well of Backuppc previously and so am open to using that in future. At the moment though, I'm looking for the simplest possible solution for those three current concerns.
Backuppc is pretty simple since you can install via yum and fill in the details in the web interface (and I'll answer questions on its mail list...). But it is somewhat hard to move its archive once you get started, so you might want to think about how you want it to work first.