Oct 29
bup - backup into a different directory
This might be totally obvious for some but it took me some reading until I found how to backup some local directory location 1 into some other local directory, location 2 with bup.
Use the -d switch (for "use this directory").
By default, bup will use the target/destination directory which is in the $BUP_DIR environment variable. Which is normally set to be ~/.bup.
Note that unlike git, bup does not work "in the current dir", so cd'ing into some dir and expecting bup to write the backup there does not work.
I found this solution via this blog post, and later found it in the official docs here.
In case you don't know, bup is this in-development backup solution based on the git packfile format, allowing you to do incremental backups, have all compressed well and it actually preserves xattribs.