I found a problem with my backups. This is what i have the rysnc command doing for my backups

rsync -r --delete --ignore-existing --exclude-from=/root/exlcudes-v -v --progress --compress /mnt/* /backup1/web1/


I run my backups every wednesday. They have been running fine so i thought. The problem that i saw is that i was no backup up current modifications to my documents.

Example: /home/jason.txt was created 4/15/2003 and was 1MB. Backups ran lets say 4/22/2003 I modified /home/jason.txt 4/20/2003 and was now 3mb. It didn't copy or overwrite the current backup i had in my /backup1/web1 directory. It was as if it just looked to see if there was a jason.txt file and then proceed to look for the next file, not looking at teh size or anything to that nautre. I was looking at the rsync man pages. Maybe i should put this line in my coding also i just wanted ot get your thoghts.

Man Pages
--size-only only use file size when determining if a file should be transferred

or

-u, --update update only (don't overwrite newer files)

i tired the -u and it didn't update the files.

any help or suggestions would be greatful on this.

Try removing "--ignore-existing".

From man page rsync(1)

--ignore-existing
This tells rsync not to update files that already
exist on the destination.
Bye

--ignore existing.

I took that out and it worked fine thanks. Though now i guess when i run my backups it will be a full backup? I kind of wanted the first time i run a backup to be a full then incrementals after so if i deleted something from my local computer /home it would delete from my backup. It looks like when i take out the --ignore existing

Could i just do a

rsync -r --delete --ignore-existing --size-only --exclude-from=/root/excludes -v -v --progress --compress /mnt/* /backup1/web1/

May i am just reading the man pages wrong. To much sitting behind the computer for 12 hours.

The rsync command I use for my work's Intranet is:

I run that with a cron job every hour. If I delete the destination (ie the very first time I ran it and once after a full redesign) it takes about 5 - 10 mins but under normay use it takes about 10 seconds (obviously depending on how much has changed)