On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 12:51 -0800, John R Pierce wrote: > On 12/03/10 12:25 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > > Whenever anyone mentions backups, I like to plug the backuppc program > > (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html and packaged in EPEL). It > > uses compression and hardlinks all duplicate files to keep much more > > history than you'd expect on line with a nice web interface - and does > > pretty much everything automatically. > I'm curious how you backup backuppc, like for disaster recovery, I know nothing about backuppc; I don't use it. But we use rsync with the same concept for a deduplicated archive. > archival, etc? since all the files are in a giant mess of symlinks No, they are not symbolic links - they are *hard links*. That they are hard-links is the actual magic. Symbolic links would provide the automatic deallocation of expires files. > (for deduplication) with versioning, I'd have to assume the archive > volume gets really messy after awhile, and further, something like that > is pretty darn hard to make a replica of it. I don't see why; only the archive is deduplicated in this manner, and it certainly isn't "messy". One simply makes a backup [for us that means to tape - a disk is not a backup] of the most current snapshot. The script just looks like - export ROOT="/srv/cifs/Arabis-Red" export STAMP=`date +%Y%m%d%H` export LASTSTAMP=`cat $ROOT/LAST.STAMP` mkdir $ROOT/$STAMP mkdir $ROOT/$STAMP/home nice rsync --verbose --archive --delete --acls \ --link-dest $ROOT/$LASTSTAMP/home/ \ --numeric-ids \ -e ssh \ archivist at arabis-red:/home/ \ $ROOT/$STAMP/home/ \ 2>&1 > $ROOT/$STAMP/home.log echo $STAMP > $ROOT/LAST.STAMP