Need help with backup (rdiff?) + compression

Question

Basically I have started looking in various ways to backup my system.
rdiff-backup cough my eye, because as I see it it's rather simple and supports incremental backups which I consider a nice feature to have.
The first question would be about the compression. If i understood it correctly rdiff keeps uncompressed mirror of selected files (as it can be restored with simple cp).
If that is the case, what would be the most sensible way to compress the backup?
Or is there another tool that does both compression and incremental backups (I use kde, but i'd rather prefer a command line tool)?
The second question would be, what should be excluded from full system backup?
I am using separate partitions for root, /boot, /var, /home.
/storage is a separate hard disk for large multimedia files, backups etc.

Answer 1

Unlike rdiff-backup rsync doesn't keep older snapshots. Rdiff compresses the snapshots as the manpage says, but not the current/latest. I have never bothered with compression as diskspace is so cheap.
As far as excluding stuff is concerned this is the 'exclude' part of the rdiff-script that backups my whole system to my NAS. The folders that don't have any files in them   but system generated stuff such as /dev , /sys and /proc have no reason to be backuped. Anything that can be regenerated such as thumbnails, and cache are safe to exclude as well . The rest is personal preference.
--exclude /dev \
--exclude /media \
--exclude /mnt \
--exclude '/home/*/.cache' \
--exclude '/home/**/Cache' \
--exclude '/home/*/.gvfs' \
--exclude '/home/*/.local/share/Trash/files' \
--exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails' \
--exclude '/home/*/.Trash' \
--exclude /var/cache/pacman/pkg \
--exclude /var/log \
--exclude /proc \
--exclude /sys \
--exclude /tmp \
Last edited by rwd (2010-10-18 18:49:12)