Backup Question, Preserving Hard Links

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 03:49:00PM -0400, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> I'm somewhat curious about how much "excessive" is.  Anyway, I'd be
> tempted to try adding even more swap space (e.g. 10 GB total?)

Is 3 GB physical RAM plus 10 GB swap excessive enough?  One grand
rsync swallowed nearly all of that, for hours.


I think I have a solution.  I don't just have a mass of random hard
links, there is structure there that I didn't describe: I have a
series of daily backup trees, each made using the wonderful link-dest
feature of rsync (check the rsync man page if you haven't used
link-dest, it is cool).  I should be able to match up which of these
trees are obsolete from the previous backup (delete them) and which
are new (have rsync make them each in turn just as it made the daily
originals, but with link-dest pointing at the previous version on the
backup disk).

The biggest problem with this is debugging it.  Test runs, even if it
runs fast, will still take time.  It is good that this should scale
pretty well.  When 300GB isn't big enough, we get the next bigger
disk.  There are already some options.

Though, as disks get even bigger, they get scarier again--two many
eggs in a single basket; anyone know of an external enclosure that
holds two 3.5 inch disks, is well cooled, and physically strong--but
not too heavy?  Though I guess I am getting ahead of myself here, we
haven't begun to outgrow our 300 GB disks.


-kb