[rdiff-backup-users] Re: will rdiff-backup work if no single backup session is long enough to finish?

[Adam Megacz]

> a) backing up laptops correctly is HARD
> b) you will have to modify your laptop behavior a little.

Not really; rsync --backup worked great.  As long as each backup
session was at least long enough for the local side to build a list of
all local files (~10min), each session would end up doing useful work.
As I understand it, newer versions of librsync (but not yet rsync)
don't need to do even this.  Anyways, at that point it wasn't a matter
of how long the individual backup-sessions lasted, but rather their
total time taken as a whole -- 100 short sessions would work fine.

The only problem is that neither rsync (nor any of the various patches
for it) can correctly back up Mac HFS resource forks to a non-HFS
remote partition.  This is a killer feature for me.

I have to say I'm really starting to appreciate the rsync project's
obsession with idempotence.

> I have a wrapper around rdiff-backup here that:
> a) runs in cron every hour
> b) 'pings' the laptop 
> c) if it was pingable, AND the last backup is > 23 hours old
> d) attempts the backup.

Can't do that; I often use my cell phone's bluetooth connection to
connect to the internet.  Magically running a backup in the background
over a 130kbps connection would be raelly bad news.

  - a