Paul Wouters wrote: > > Nothing beats rsync over ssh in combination with "cp -l" > > Twenty lines of shell script gives me 30 live live and full backups > per host:dir combination, with only about 2.4 times the storage per tree. > Without the annoyance of partial/incremental trees. We smb export them > readonly, and all users can click their way back for 30 days to help > themselves restore files. I've been using a very similar method for years, and I can only recommend it: directories containing the timestamp in their name, hardlinks, readonly export through SMB/NFS/netatalk/apache. I recently replaced the "cp -al" with the "--link-dest" rsync option. One problem is that you don't really know how much disk space the new backup will use, so deciding how many backups you will keep is not easy; you may fill the disk or have unused free space (I want my backup disk almost full, so I can go far back in time). My solution is to automatically check disk space every 5 seconds while rsync is running; when it is below a certain threshold, the oldest directory is deleted. To avoid a dangerous race between rsync consuming space and rm freeing space, I send a "kill -STOP" to rsync and then "kill -CONT" when the free space is good again. Works perfectly. One day I decided to remove some old backups by launching an rm command for each snapshot directory in parallel. I then realized that there were more than 1000 directories, and the total number of files to be deleted was around 100 million. It took some time, but everything went fine; not a bad stress test for the machine (reiserfs/LVM2/nv_sata) I had never seen a load average above 1000 until then. :-) There is only one thing I'd like to improve: renamed or moved files are seen as new files and are not hardlinked. I didn't try if "--fuzzy" works for hardlinking too. Best regards. -- Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
