Scott Silva wrote:
on 1/30/2008 5:24 AM Jerry Geis spake the following:
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
This is approximately 102G of data.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Jerry
Rsync's main benefit is on backups of changed files. dumping to a new destination every time makes rsync less efficient than just about every other option. Now if you made the new directory, and hardlinked the old stuff to the new directory, then rsync would shine.
Yes. That's my experience, too. I do something like this twice weekly to 2 external USB drives. One drive contains backups from the most recent 2 Sunday mornings, the other drive contains two backups from Wednesday mornings. After mounting the backup drive, doing a space-available check and a couple other housekeeping chores, I do this. # (I've purposely left out a bunch of stuff to avoid being blamed when someone's system craters. )
$UD #-- Previously identified as the USB drive mount point # DT=`date +%F` #-- Today's date, for naming the backup directory: yyyy-mm-dd # # Shuffle directories so that oldest backup directory is renamed to today's date. # OD=`ls -1 $UD | head -1` #echo "Renaming $UD/$OD to $UD/$DT" mv $UD/$OD/ $UD/$DT touch $UD/$DT
# Now, data that is only 2 weeks old will be overwritten with current data.
for SD in <list of directories to back up> ; do rsync -ar --exclude '*.iso' --delete-excluded /$SD/* $UD/$DT/$SD done
# I've used the basic outline above since Sept 13, 2006 and have found that the backup takes slightly more than half as long as when I used "find" and "cpio". As with anything else, YMMV.