How to back up my home folder ~/

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The new Rock 6.0 is going to automatically upgrade. How should I prepare?

Well, get your backups done. If anything goes wrong, you can restore your files on a new install. I recommend grsync to do the backup job. It is simple and quick. It is easy enough to drag the folder back after you get your new install done.

Today, we are using a thumb drive that I know is large enough to hold my home folder. It is named Thumb just for this event.

sudo dnf install grsync

Open grsync. Keep the default settings.

Let’s select our source location. ~/

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We don’t want the folder open, but highlighted, so we need to go up one level

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Select home

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Now you should see you folder highlighted below. Click Open

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Now, lets get the target location

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I am selecting my external Thumb drive

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Lets save that path. Click Open

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Click the Advanced tab and type in --exclude .cache
We don’t need to waste space backing up this folder.

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We’re done! Run it.

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Once it has completed, open a few of the saved files and verify that they are good.
Get another backup of them on another drive.

I also like to grab a copy of my /etc/fstab and it has been so handy to refer to.

This is so simple to do. Do this on a regular basis. There is no excuse for not backing up your files. Only you can prevent data loss.

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After you have done the above and realized just how simple it is to save your files, you may want to create a profile and save it. This will allow you to just open the app and click the run button.

It will even let you grab the command for it and just run it in a terminal.

You can even save it in a crontab and let it run on a schedule.

There are checkboxes that will allow you to do differential backups saving time.

I’ll say it again. There is no excuse for not protecting your files.

NOTE: After you have verified that your backup works and you want the command,
Click File
Click Rsync command line
Copy the command in the box
Paste that into the terminal and run it any time

There are many ways to back up your data. I don’t care which one you use, but please use one.

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