On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 at 3:48pm, Jonathan Dill wrote > On another note, maybe things have changed, but I once found that gnutar > incremental backups sucked performance-wise, would make machines pretty > much unusable during estimates and dumps. Normally, this would not > matter, but you're talking University with eccentric grad students > working at 3am and such who complain about these things. I have > migrated most things to XFS filesystem and use xfsdump on Linux and > IRIX--a process that I started when XFS went Open Source (around Red Hat > 7.0) and I got tired of waiting for the problems with dump for ext2fs to > get sorted out. Machines are still very usable with xfsdump and > software compression running in the background, and finish faster than > gnutar dumps. xfsdump estimates are very fast, comparatively speaking.
XFS and xfsdump are indeed very nice. But filesystems like this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jlb]$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on . . . $SERVER0:/data 535G 518G 18G 97% /data $SERVER1:/moredata 1.8T 1.2T 621G 66% /moredata $SERVER2:/emfd 2.0T 779G 1.3T 39% /emfd make tar rather necessary (those are all XFS on Linux servers BTW). For the record, estimates on those servers go *very* fast (<5 min). I *do* have one server with a 1T XFS filesystem that takes a *long* time to estimate one particular direcotory (~90 minutes). But I'm pretty sure that's due to an inordinately large number of tiny files and subdirectories in there (about which I'm beating up the user). -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
