28 Dec, 2005
Strong Space
I have recently started using Strongspaceto backup all my files. This is a really good service that provides 4Gb of space for $5 a month! The great thing about this is all our digital photo's can be kept safely. It is one of the major downsides of digital photography if your PC breaks you could lose the lot.
The only obvious downside is they use SFTP or RSYNC to upload which will make it quite hard for non techy users to use. Fortunately there is a blog with details.
The one feature of Rsync that I wanted that this does not explain and the rsync manual does explain but not very clearly is how to do excludes and includes.
In my example I wanted to back up the My Pictures and Secure folder under My Documents but not the rest. The simplest way to do this is to use a filter file.
To do this create a file (I called my exlc but you can call it what you like) with lines like the following in
+ /My Documents/
+ /My Documents/Secure/
+ /My Documents/My Pictures/
- /My Documents/*
This will cause rsync to (in order)
- Ignore Everything
- Look in My Documents
- Look in My Documents/Secure
- Look in My Documents/My Pictures
- Ignore everything else in My Documents
Then run rsync as per the tutorial with the --exclude-from option pointing at your file - e.g.
rsync -avz --delete --exclude-from=excl "/cygdrive/d/My Documents" username@username.strongspace.com:mydocs