So I have a nearly full 4 TB hard drive in my server that I want to make an offline backup of. However, the only spare hard drives I have are a few 500 GB and 1 TB ones, so the entire contents will not fit all at once, but I do have enough total space for it. I also only have one USB hard drive dock so I can only plug in one...
It’s going to take a little work here, but I have a large drive on my plex, and a couple of smaller drives that I back everything up to. On the large drive get a list of the main folders. You can do a “du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hk1” on the root folder to get an idea of how you should split them up. Once you have an idea, make two files, each with their own list of folders (eg: folders1.out and folders2.out) that you want to go to each separate drive. If you have both of the smaller drives mounted, just execute the rsync commands, otherwise, just do each rsync command with the corresponding drive mounted. Here’s an example of my rsync commands. Keep in mind I am going from an ext4 filesystem to a couple of ntfs drives, which is why I use the size only. Make sure and do a dry run or two, and you may or may not want the ‘–delete’ command in there. Since I don’t want to keep files I have deleted from my plex, I have it delete them on the target drive also.
What's an elegant way of automatically backing up the contents of a large drive to multiple smaller drives that add up to the capacity of the large drive?
So I have a nearly full 4 TB hard drive in my server that I want to make an offline backup of. However, the only spare hard drives I have are a few 500 GB and 1 TB ones, so the entire contents will not fit all at once, but I do have enough total space for it. I also only have one USB hard drive dock so I can only plug in one...