Nightly Automatic Backups over SSH with Rsync

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and the reason for posting was none to thrilling. Installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my primary desktop, I only realized after the fact that the partition I chose to format for the new install was my home directory from the previous install. I guess I was just a little bit too anxious. Not losing anything too important thanks to Dropbox and my massive media partition, I decided it was important that from now on I keep remote backups of my home directory. Repurposing my old laptop whose video card has been flaky seemed like the perfect choice so I fired up Ubuntu 8.04 desktop on that machine and configured its secondary hard drive to be for backups only. I followed this nifty tutorial here: . The only modifications I had made were in the cron script which I put $LPATH before $RPATH because rsync takes SRC and then DEST as parameters in that order making the script run improperly. Using a static IP for the server laptop on my router guarantees that as long as the box is up and running, I’ll have a nightly backup of everything in my home directory.