From man rsync
Using rsync requires a careful and repeated reading of the man page. I find --dry-run (-n) and --verbose (-v) to be particularly useful.

I understand what the / is doing in the source section - if it is missing - it will create that folder in the destination, but you said earlier to create the target folder on the destination drive BEFORE executing the backup.

I was asking about the final / in the destination instruction. do I add the / after sun? or not

Please give me an example of a one line - complete based on my example, based on this one line - will I need to create the folder ahead or not?

What is the point of the -v / verbose argument? I am not sitting there to watch the backup? My Terminal window is NOT open either at backup time

Thanks again
Alex

When you run crontab -e, are you root or using sudo, or are you just your normal user?
I don't know where your system logs cron. See what man cron says about logs on your system.

As I understand it, and as sgosnell has said a couple of times here, yes, the destination directory must exist prior to running rsync. rsnapshot manages that for me by creating the destination directory before running the rsync command.

DEST trailing slash: I'm not sure. I see that the command that rsnapshot created I posted in #36 has a trailing slash, but most of the examples in the man page do not. Try it both ways and see what happens.

-v is useful when doing dry runs to see what's going to be copied. I agree it's not necessary on cron runs.

When I run crontab -e, I just type it as it is, am I supossed to type : sudo crontab -e ?
I understand you don't see what is in front of me.

I will check the manual

Thank you
Alex

Not necessarily. As long as the files you're copying are readable by the user that's running the job (you), you don't (shouldn't) need to be root. If running your rsync command from the command line creates your backup, then you should be ok.

It's not clear to me whether or not you've successfully created a backup yet. Take the problem is steps.

1. set up your destination
2. run the rsync manually, from the command line - confirm it worked
3. set up the crontab - confirm that worked.

OK, Here is what I did

1) In the target device, i created manually a folder called sun (for Sunday)
2) In teminal mode, I executed : rsync -rv /home/alex/alexfolders /media/New-SD-512/sun
3) I got error - permission denied
4) Then I ran sudo rsync -rv /home/alex/alexfolders /media/New-SD-512/sun

The command is now running and doing it!

So, why does the cron job not doing it, how can I get the cron job to run as sudo / root automatically?

Thanks
Alex

No, weekly at the end does not run it weekly. That was just a hypothetical name of a folder on the destination. The times the command is run by cron is determined entirely by the first 5 positions in the line.
Yes, you will have to create all those folders on the destination drive. Then put a line in the crontab for each day, as shown above.

OK, I ran the one line for Sunday in Terminal mode ... It finished too fast IMO... At the end, i had this message


sent 36,998,650,777 bytes received 400,345 bytes 132,851,170.99 bytes/sec
total size is 36,988,192,756 speedup is 1.00

The sun folder was however empty

So, what can I do?
Alex

The permissions problem is an ownership problem. Alex does not own /media/New-SD-512, root does. You have two options. Change the ownership, or run the cronjobs through the root crontab. I would probably change the ownership.

I have no idea what, exactly, you did with "OK, I ran the one line for Sunday in Terminal mode " We need the exact syntax you used. Try this: after changing ownership of the SD card, or precede that with sudo. The verbose option may give you some clues about errors, if they happen.

I ran the same command before , but without the / after sun.
Now I ran it again, following your example with the / at the end, I got this message

alex@alex-nuc8i7hnk:~$ sudo rsync -av /home/alex/alexfolders /media/New-SD-512/sun/
[sudo] password for alex:
sending incremental file list

sent 614,813 bytes received 3,507 bytes 1,236,640.00 bytes/sec
total size is 36,988,192,756 speedup is 59,820.47


BUT - the sun folder is still EMPTY

So,?

No idea how do I change ownership?

#55
Please use code tags when posting terminal output!!

Any clues in the verbose output?
With no trailing / on the source, there should be a alexfolders directory in the sun directory
Incremental?