[CentOS] Simple backup program

Wed Jun 14 19:37:16 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com