On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Hugh E Cruickshank <hugh at forsoft.com> wrote: > >> > If not LessFS can you suggest an alternate deduplication software? >> >> Backuppc dedups (and compresses) at the file level using hardlinks. > > Trust you to always come up with an interesting suggestion or two. I > will have a further look at this but, on first blush, I do not think > that this will be very effective in our environment. We will be backing > up several small databases 1-8 GB each along with the related programs > from our development system, out users home directories which include > their Outlook PST files, Word/Excel files, etc. While the compression > should work for all files I can not see the dedup working for much > beyond the Word/Excel files. We will definitely have a look at it. Big disks are cheap these days - I wouldn't worry that much about the total space that much and you'll still be able to keep a lot online. The db's are probably best handled in a pre-backup script that dumps/compresses them, then excluding the live files - and then even block de-dup won't help. Pst's are a problem any way you look at them but more because of Outlook's locking than their size. Backuppc is packaged in EPEL so it's easy to install and shows the compression and file re-use stats so you'll know in a few runs how it will handle your data. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com