Thanks for this tutorial. I plan on exploiting this myself soon, supported or not.

lame.

…
6 The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose.. DreamHost Web Hosting servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service. DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the backups/archives at their discretion. …

The question is, if server in EEUU (dreamhost) don’t want problem with the info no readable (is encrypted) stored in your servers.
Some rules about this?

rsync: mkdir [dir name] failed: No such file or directory (2)
Does anyone know how to fix it without create by hand all the directories ? it’s strange that rsync cannot creat recursively the directories …

I have a problem though, when I run the “rsync” command, it copies all of my “Home” folders to the dreamhost server… BUT… it only copies the actual folders…. no files…. all the folders on the dreamhost server are empty. Can someone help me???

I tried to back up my “Home” folder using the “~/” which is about 160GB… All the Folders (empty) show up on the dreamhost server only 0.02MB… ???

Please help me.

Thanks in advance

I’m already seeing how this would be a good time to clean up and reorganize my Documents folder. As the rsync lists every single file, I find myself thinking, “I still need *that*?”

thanks again for helping me crack the Terminal for the very first time.

Scott

From what you copied / pasted into comment above, it looks like you’re actually running the rsync command while logged in to your dreamhost server! Is that so? Once you’ve done an SSH into your server, you’re actually running commands on the server, not on your local computer.

You need to exit (type ‘exit’, or just close the terminal and reopen it again), make sure that the command prompt shows the name of your local computer, and THEN run the rsync command.

The rsync command needs to be from FROM the local computer, TO the server.

However, when I enter this line:
[otto]$ rsync -avz ~/Documents/ scotts@otto.dreamhost.com:~/laptop.bak/Documents/

… it does two strange things. One, it asked me for my password:
scotts@otto.dreamhost.com’s password:

I thought since I was able to ssh without a password, it wouldn’t ask for that again.

The second strange thing is that it “fails” :

building file list … rsync: link_stat “/home/scotts/Documents/.” failed: No such file or directory (2)
done
sent 29 bytes received 20 bytes 8.91 bytes/sec
total size is 0 speedup is 0.00
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(789)
[otto]$

(I changed the server name above for security).

Any ideas? I had a friend who’s hot on the Terminal look at it, and he’s baffled as well.

Scott

That’s fine - that’s what it should be.

[quote]However, I’m unclear what the “SERVER” name is. Is that what DHost calls the “Machine” column in the list of Users?

In any case, when I open a new Terminal window and I type “ssh mybackup@otto” (where “otto” is the Machine name), I get the following in the Terminal window:
otto: No address associated with nodename Smith-Mac-G5:~ rso$ [/quote]

Make sure that you use the entire machine name that dreamhost supplied you. In other words, don’t just use “otto”, use “otto.dreamhost.com”. For the example you used, the full command would be “ssh mybackup@otto.dreamhost.com”

You might also be running into some problems on the Dreamhost end. They’ve had pretty much a nightmare run this week, with hardware crashing and several key components of their network going haywire. So, even if you are doing everything correctly, you might still be running into some login problems.

You can keep track of how the actual server is doing by checking the dreamhost status blog:

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com

I did successfully create a new User account at DHost. I chose the “Shell account - allows FTP plus ssh/telnet access.” I’m not sure what “Shell Type” to select, so I just left it as the default, which was “/bin/bash”.

However, I’m unclear what the “SERVER” name is. Is that what DHost calls the “Machine” column in the list of Users?

In any case, when I open a new Terminal window and I type “ssh mybackup@otto” (where “otto” is the Machine name), I get the following in the Terminal window:
otto: No address associated with nodename Smith-Mac-G5:~ rso$

And that’s where I’ve been stuck for weeks. Any ideas?

But are you guys sure you want to be putting your credit card information and every personal document and email you have on someone else’s remote server?

You are asking for a lot of trouble.

You would have to take all highly private documents and photos out of the folder you are backing up and put them somewhere else.

Otherwise, a very clever solution.

Enough people do it, though, and Dreamhost will be out of business or have to ban such backups.

Well, people has already mentioned the problem with the forks, and that is quite a trouble.

In my case I just found out that I have too many strange crap in my home folders that I don’t want to backup (movies, songs , and so on). So I am trying to use zsh completion stuff to do the backup only for my small files (less than 2Mb):

rsync -Ravz ~/Desktop/**/*(.LM-2) User@Host:~/iBook.bak/

But this is a very unoptimal solution…

In fact, I should ratther organise up my home directory stuff and I should place all my personal things in the Document folder instead of having it on Desktop and many other places.

[quote]KiltBear, I left a similar comment on Part 2, but I thought you’d be interested in this solution. A patched version of rsync that preserves resource forks by using the AppleDouble (._filename) format. Here’s the link:

http://www.onthenet.com.au/~q/rsync//quote

Thanks Andy, that is great. I am trying it out now. Looks promising!

First you might want to look at rsnapshot. It uses rsync to make incremental backups… would be great for this type of thing…

The next thing you might want to try for security is to make a secure disk image stored on the dreamhost server. Use webdav to mount the server then mount the diskimage… dreamhost shouldn’t be able to see that … I did something like this once on a clients server that wasn’t paying regularly…

There are two huge advantages to off-site backup on a server. First, if something catastrophic happens, like a fire or theft, I need to have my critical files stored in some other location. Secondly, it enables you to access those……