How to truncate backup paths in rsnapshot

rsnapshot

I'm not sure if the heading is really coorect. I have a line in my rsnapshot.conf

backup  root@123.123.123.123:/mnt/rsnapshot/      srv01/

So rsnapshot creates a directors RSNAPSHOT_ROOT/daily.0/srv01/mnt/rsnapshot and puts the backed-up files there. For me, the /mnt/rsnapshot part is unnecessary; I'd rather have my backed-up files directly in RSNAPSHOT_ROOT/daily.0/srv01/. Is there any way to achieve this?

Best Answer

rsnapshot uses the --relative flag of rsync to preserve pathname information. In most cases, you probably do want to keep (at least some of) that information, especially when backing up local directories. However, in your case, you really don't need to keep the leading path prefix.

With reasonably recent versions of rsync (v.2.6.7+), you can explicitly control the portion of the pathname prefix that --relative saves by inserting a ./ at the desired cut-point. The ./ does not effectively change the pathname, but it does tell rsync that you want --relative to only keep the part of the pathname that follows the ./. Since you want to cut off the entire pathname, you simply append the ./ onto the end of the source path, like this:

backup  root@123.123.123.123:/mnt/rsnapshot/./  srv01/

EDIT

Okay, so it looks like the ./ trick won't work in this case, since rsnapshot strips off the trailing /. Instead, you should be able to disable the --relative option on a per-backup-point basis, by adding a fourth column to your backup line, like this:

backup  root@123.123.123.123:/mnt/rsnapshot/  srv01/  +rsync_long_args=--no-relative

The +rsync_long_args tells rsnapshot to append to its existing rsync_long_args option, for the current backup-point only. By appending --no-relative to rsync_long_args, you achieve the desired effect of turning off --relative.

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