Backing up sporadically mounted drives

Hi there,

I want to schedule backups of certain drives that I connect/mount haphazardly. For me it would be enough that, whenever they’re found mounted, they’re backed up or otherwise just skipped. They all have different mount points (it is an assortment of zfs/btrfs pools and rclone remotes).

From my tests, when the drives are unmounted kopia creates an empty backup, which is lumped together with all other identical empty backups. This is to some extent acceptable, although it enters into the rotations, so you may lose a valid backup in exchange for an empty one.

If the mount point doesn’t exist at all the backup is skipped, which is OK, but not fitting well with my workflow where I have all mount points pre-created.

Maybe a solution could be to have an “skip if empty” flag. Just throwing the idea out there, thanks for your work on Kopia.

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“skip if empty” sounds plausible and it could be the first step, I’m thinking of something more general:

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I see, running a user script that checked the mount point would certainly do the trick.

I need the exact same use-case. I have an external drive that I want to backup and that I connect only once or twice a month. Is there any other solution than either having all the scheduled tasks failed or only running the backup manually?