How to backup an offsite server?

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@Lappert

I gather with an offsite server, I’ll need to run Rclone as CLI, not with the browser.

Yes that is correct

@Lappert

I would write up some crontabs that sequentially invoked Rsync for various directories on the system (and some needed tarring beforehand). It seemed presumptuous to hope to find that one command that would backup an entire drive or entire system.

You can use one rclone command to back lots of things up. I'd use the --include-from flag (or maybe the --filter-from flag to set up a list of things you want in and out of the backup, then run rclone from the root of the file system.

So

rclone sync --include-from backup-dirs / remote:backup

For backups, also check out the --backup-dir flag

@Lappert

So I looked around here and so far I haven’t seen any discussion or tutorial on how to run Rclone on a remote server. I would appreciate any links to any such discussions if they exist. Absent that, I’d appreciate any suggested rclone commands (and especially examples) to get this underway.

Probably the most complicated part is the initial setup of the config file. The easiest way is to set up the config file on your local computer then find it with rclone config file and copy it to the remote server.