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