[CentOS] rsync and swapping

[William L. Maltby]

On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 17:14 +0100, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
> 
> Marcelo Roccasalva wrote:
> > On Jan 30, 2008 11:24 AM, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote:
> >> hi all,
> >>
> >> I use rsync to copy/backup ALL my stuff to another disk.
> >>
> >> When I run this seems like my machine (4 GIG ram centos 5.1)
> >> now begins to swap out more programs. Is there a way to reduce
> >> that swapping? I am running with echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
> >>
> >> I simply mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/backup; mkdir /mnt/backup/month.day.year
> >> then rsync -a /home /mnt/backup/mon.day.year
> > 
> > IMHO, rsync is overkill here. I would:
> > 
> > mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/backup; mkdir /mnt/backup/month.day.year
> > cd /home;find . | cpio -vdump /mnt/backup/mon.day.year
> 
> how about cp -a ?

How about "find -newer" to just back up things that have been added or
changed? A big space saver. *However*, this leaves things deleted since
the previous backup(s) in the previous archives. A *good* or *bad*
thing? Depends on what you want to achieve.

Rsync can handle that situation for you, and so is better if you don't
want to keep deleted files around.

The cpio solution offers a lot, most beneficial here is the ability to
bzip the archive (anticipating it won't be frequently used), saving a
lot of space.

> <snip sig stuff>

-- 
Bill