Here’s how not to invoke rdiff-backup, presuming your USB drive is mounted on /media/disk:

rdiff-backup –force / /media/disk

That’s how I did it the first time; I thought that backup was running an awfully long time, and that there was a helluva lot more stuff on the USB drive than even existed on the drive being backed up.

It then hit me that, with the aforementioned invocation, that I was backing up the contents of /media/disk onto itself, and that means some infinite recursion, divide-by-zero, blazing fireball of death.

Now, I’m doing the following:

rdiff-backup –force –exclude /media / /media/disk

I think my prospects are greatly enhanced. I post this gobsmackingly stupid episode as a reminder to myself to try to remain humble, irrespective of how great I think I may be at times.

Pardon me, whilst I don my suit of sackcloth. And the Brick of Humility necklace.

-k-