Another idea

[Ben Escoto]

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>>>>> "TP" == Tobias Polzin <polzin_spamprotect_@gmx.de>
>>>>> wrote the following on Wed, 28 Aug 2002 19:54:35 +0200

  TP> Using the idea from www.mikerubel.org I could use hard-links:

  TP> 1) BACKUPSERVER:  cp -al backup/ mirror
  TP> rm -rf mirror/rdiff-backup-data

  TP> I tried it a little and it worked (even with copying
  TP> hard-links).

  TP> Do you see any problems with this?

Seems like it shoudl work and is a good idea - I hadn't considered
combining the two approaches in that way.  Of course, you still end up
creating either an extra directory or an extra hard link for every
file being backed up, but not much extra space should be taken up.

    You may be able to speed your scheme up, maybe by a factor of
two or so, by not copying the backup/rdiff-backup directory to begin
with (instead of copying it and then deleting it).  Not sure what the
easiest way of doing this would be (maybe a few lines of shell code).

  TP> By the way: Do you have experience how fast the
  TP> rdiff-backup-data directory for the diff-files grows?

As luck would have it someone just mailed me their statistics:

ElapsedTime 11169.37 (3 hours 6 minutes 9.37 seconds)
SourceFiles 2804901
SourceFileSize 108843148594 (101 GB)
MirrorFiles 2803518
MirrorFileSize 108978502450 (101 GB)
NewFiles 24337
NewFileSize 1049841136 (1001 MB)
DeletedFiles 22954
DeletedFileSize 1185845780 (1.10 GB)
ChangedFiles 41679
ChangedSourceSize 1618255510 (1.51 GB)
ChangedMirrorSize 1617604722 (1.51 GB)
IncrementFiles 88971
IncrementFileSize 618601165 (590 MB)
TotalDestinationSizeChange 483247309 (461 MB)
Errors 10

so now you have a very scientific sample size of 2..

  TP> Thanks for your answer.  It would be interesting to know, for
  TP> how long you backup/keep your diff files.

I just accumulate them until I run out of disk space and then I use
--remove-older-than.  Currently I have about 45 days worth (at one
session per day).  I used to have 100+; time to get a bigger hard
drive I suppose.


-- 
Ben Escoto

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