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.