Sequencing Vaults

Dirvish rsyncs each vault in series, in the order listed in the /etc/divish/master.conf Runall list. You should plan the order in which the vaults are processed to match your needs.

For example, I sometimes work very late at night, and so I set /etc/cron.d to run the script that calls dirvish-runall at 0400. On the other hand, I sometimes have an early morning flight, and want the backups for my laptop completed first. So I schedule my laptop first, with the critical /home partition for the laptop the first in the sequence, and static partitions like root and /boot scheduled later. If necessary, I can grab my laptop and head for the airport at 0430, and still have a good backup.

Since I am obsessive about backups, I also have a spare hard drive mounted in my thinkpad ultrabay the night before a trip, and start an fsck, followed by a dd from my main drive to the ultrabay drive, followed by a reboot (so divish can work later on), before going to sleep. This gives me a bootable spare drive while on the road ... along with a spare AC adapter, a spare ethernet cable, etc. Like I said -- obsessive!