TechKnack

Lately, I’ve been setting up a home computer backup system using rdiff-backup. I use rdiff-backup because it stores incremental backups and it can send the backups to a remote server over SSH. This means that, once you get passwordless SSH running, you can set up various cron jobs to backup your files to your server every once in a while.

The latest version in the Ubuntu Hardy repos is version 1.1.15-1. I’ve been having problems with this version when trying to list increments over SSH; it would, consistently, exit with a “No such file or directory” error whenever I tried to “rdiff-backup -l server::/path/to/backup”. I couldn’t find any info on this problem on the net, let alone a solution. I did, however, find a mailing list entry announcing the release of rdiff-backup 1.1.16. After further googling, I found some rdiff-backup 1.1.16 deb files for Ubuntu Hardy. Download, install on all computers that use it, and, voila, I can list increments remotely!