On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 01:09:46AM +0700, Robert Parker via luv-main wrote:
Thanks Rick, I actually rsync everything to an local external drive daily
Well I hope you are not doing it with the -delete option in place because
if you are it will faithfully remove from your backup set everything that has gone missing from your source drive.
more importantly, using rsync's --delete option won't leave cruft from uninstalled packages and other deleted files strewn all over your filesystem. i made the mistake of forgetting to use --delete on an rsync transfer of one of my systems' OS disk to a new disk once, didn't discover it until after i'd made the final swap to the new disk. left me with an enormous mess that took over a year of gradual cleanups plus a final concerted effort involving find and several custom scripts to process /var/lib/dpkg/info/* files to tidy up the mess. even now i'm not 100% sure i've got it all. and yes, all that cruft did cause numerous problems. inevitable, really, with extra crap like partial packages, obsolete libs and binaries. don't try this at home, it'll suck. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>