[Discuss] On-site backups revisited - rsnapshot vs. CrashPlan

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 02/21/2013 10:52 AM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:53:38 -0500
> Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>> I don't understand this last statement.  While I understand that you
>> couldn't backup *to* a windows file system, I don't understand why you
>> cannot backup a windows file system?
> Jerry is simply mistaken. rsync, thus rsnapshot, works just fine with
> NTFS source, target, or both modulo NTFS security which rsync does not
> know about.
>
I am not mistaken, but you are absolutely correct. The big win with an
rsync backup is the --link-dest where rsync creates a hard link when the
file being backed up is identical to it's counterpart in the --link-dest
target. Since NTFS does not support hard links, thethe current and
previous backup directories would be not share any space. So, the
hourly0 and hourly1 (assuming rsnapshot)would take up about twice the
space of its Linux counterpart. So, certainly rsnapshot and rsync would
work fine, but you would not get the benefit of hard links and each
backup would bea full backup.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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