cd-burning/tapeing rdiff-backups?

[Ben Escoto]

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>>>>> "GZ" == Gregor Zattler <texmex@uni.de>
>>>>> wrote the following on Tue, 3 Sep 2002 13:10:54 +0200

  GZ> How do i achive the copying of the incremets? Would cp -a
  GZ> /backup/*2002.07.* /backbackup catch all necessary files?
 
  >> No, the backup files will be in several directories in
  >> /backup/rdiff-backup-data.

  GZ> ?? but "cp -a" also traverses directorys?

Yes, but the directories names do not necessarily contain "2002.07.".
An increment called

/backup/rdiff-backup-data/increments/foo/bar.2002-07-01T04:22:02-07:00.dir

would not be copied by your command.

  GZ> My rdiff-backup slowly gets to large.  Say i can hold only one
  GZ> month of increments on disk.  I can --remove-older-than
  GZ> increments to free Diskussion space.  But before i do that i
  GZ> want to backup this increments to CDs.  I want to do this every
  GZ> month.  So in the unprobably but not impossible case i want to
  GZ> restore a file in a the status months ago i can somehow[1]
  GZ> restore the rdiff-backup directory from CD using say tar or cpio
  GZ> and then restore this file as of 2002-03-27 using rdiff-backup.

Ok, I get it.  As I think you mentioned earlier, rdiff-backup only
adds files and directories to rdiff-backup-data, it never modifies or
deletes any (except for the 2 log files, and it modifies directories
in the sense that it adds files to them).

    So if you want a list of files that needs backing up you can
probably just use find to find the new files, as in "find
./rdiff-backup-data -ctime -3" will find files newer than 3 days old.

    Offhand I don't know how to use this to copy them over, but it's
probably possible using cp and xargs, or some other shell utility.
(Perhaps someone else knows.)  Worst case you will have do a bit of
shell scripting...

    Oh, I had a thought, you could run find and then pipe it to tar,
which could create a big tarball of all the old increments, and you
could just save the tarballs to cdr or tape.  (I don't know the tar
syntax though.)

  GZ> [1] This may involve buying a new hard Diskussion for the large
  GZ> rdiff-backup or repartitioning or ...

You could also restore parts of the archive at a time, perhaps.


-- 
Ben Escoto

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