On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 12:45, Bowie Bailey wrote:
You are going to have more trouble than that. Backuppc will have millions of hardlinks in that 161GB and nearly all file oriented backup programs will take an impractical amount of time to deal with them. And restoring will be even worse - basically everything ends up building a table of inode numbers and scanning it for a match on every hardlink.
True, but this will only be used as a last-case scenario for restores, so in that case I'm willing to wait a bit.
Try it before you need it. I'll guess that 'a bit' will turn out to be at least several days.
You really want a matching external hard drive so you can dd an image copy to it. There has been quite a bit of discussion on this topic on the backuppc mail list and I'm not sure anyone has come up with an ideal solution. Or, you can use the 'archive host' feature of backuppc to generate tar images of backup runs optionally compressed and split to fit your media, but these are copies of individual hosts and you loose the pooling feature.
I agree that hard drives are faster, larger, and cheaper than tapes, but I can drop a tape onto a concrete floor and reasonably expect it to work afterwards. A hard drive might still work, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Yes, the trick is to have 2 or more of the external drives so you'd have to drop them both at once - and don't ever put them in the same place - that is, don't bring back the previous copy until you've made the next one. I set up amanda years ago and still let it make tapes for offsite storage because it is mostly automatic, but I haven't restored from tape since starting to use backuppc and hope I don't ever have to again.