tob is a general driver for the making and maintaining of backups. It makes full backups, differential backups (of the files which were changed since the last full backup), incremental backups (of the files which were changed since all previous backups), lets you determine the size of the backup before actually making it, and maintains listings of made backups.
tob can create backups on either tape devices or your computer's filesystem. Backups stored in your filesystem are automatically deleted once they reach a certain age.
Please note that some archivers prefer to get specifications without the leading slash, e.g. 'etc/apache/*'. Arj is one example.
/
/usr
Since the default behavior of tob is to select only files from one device and not to descend different devices, in this scenario, if you provide a starting directory of / , then /usr would not be backed up.
If your start directories have spaces or special characters in them, they must be escaped for the bash shell, which generally means a backslash in front of spaces:
/windows/Documents\ and\ Settings/
A second file, name.exclude, can be created to indicate files to exclude from a backup name. This file is optional. When present, the exclude file must contain grep-expressions of the names to exclude, one name per line. E.g., for a backup named unix of the whole Unix filesystem it may be a good idea to exclude the temporary files from /tmp and /usr/tmp. A possible exclude file unix.exclude might then contain
.*/tmp/.*
Please consult
grep(1)
for regular expressions.