01 Apr 09 backing up your VortexBox using rsync

Rsync is a protocol designed to efficiently mirror a remote file or file system. Rsync is very useful for backups.

VortexBox shares out the ‘files’ share using rsync by default. So you don’t need to set up an rsync server on VortexBox.

If you have a second VortexBox or anther system that has rsync these are the commands to back up the files from a remote VortexBox to your local system. The following command will list the files on your remote VortexBox. Replace 192.168.1.100 with the IP addresss of your VortexBox.

rsync -vh 192.168.1.100::files

The next commands will mirror the remote VortexBox file system. This mirrors all the files on the /storage partition

cd /storage

rsync -rt --progress 192.168.1.100::files/* ./

This will transfer all the file from the remote /storage folder to your local system. Directories will be created as needed. This first time you run this command it will take a long time. The next time you run it one the new files and files that have changes will be transfered so the process will be quicker.

If you would like to copy the files to a windows machine you can use a program like DeltaCopy This is a windows GUI version of rsync.

Note: to backup to a USB attached disk you can use something like

rsync -rt --progress /storage/* /media/backup/