on 10/11/2007 7:16 AM Ashley M. Kirchner spake the following:
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Thanks, but this will still download and keep *all* updates for a platform.
If they exist on the mirror, then yes. However, anything that gets removed from the mirror you're using, will also get deleted from your local copy. That's the whole idea behind rsync's --delete flag. In my case, I don't really care if the CentOS mirrors don't delete old stuff, I just pull everything down. However, on the Fedora side, they do remove old packages, and rsync will automatically remove them from the local copy as well. I backup some 15 servers that way. They're all going to a single backup server where I keep up to 6 weeks worth of data (for some, 2 weeks on others) using rsync as a backup utility. Using hardlinks between backups allows me to keep that much information. And if a file gets removed from the source, it will get removed from the backup as well, but only for that run, not the previous ones.
As for not having rsync on Win2K, you can install CygWin on it and use rsync then. I have a Server2003 pulling 2 TiB of data every night from an old Win2K server using rsync.
With the space crunch on the CentOS mirrors, I don't know why they don't just have the latest files in the updates mirrors and move all the older stuff to vault. If someone wants an older release of a file, you need to get it directly anyway. It wouldn't save a ton of space, but it would save some.