Les Mikesell writes:
> On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 10:49 +0100, Klaas Vantournhout wrote:
> > Dear users and developers of the mighty backup program,
> >
> > I was wondering if it is possible to put a certain full backup or
> > incremental in the attic. It is can we save a certain backup
> > permanently disregarding changes in the config file and so on?
>
> I'll second this as a feature request that could be implemented
> by duplicating the hardlinks of a backup tree into different
> area to be saved until explicitly deleted and browsed in a different
> way so they could remain even if the host entry and pc/* directory
> were removed. This would be very handy for decommissioning a box
> or to hold a copy made before a major update or change until you
> are sure it is no longer needed.
If you just rename the directory and rename the host (eg: HOST_old)
then the right thing should happen.
> Meanwhile the best approach is probably to make an archive copy
> as a tar image either with the "archive host" support or
> BackupPC_tarCreate. These have the advantage of being able to
> survive the backuppc installation since all you need is tar to
> restore from them - and the disadvantage of not pooling space
> with other copies of the same files.
For 3.0.0 I wrote a script bin/BackupPC_tarPCCopy that, given one or
more pc paths (eg: TOPDIR/pc/HOST or TOPDIR/pc/HOST/nnn), creates
a tar archive with all the hardlinks pointing to ../cpool/....
Any files not hardlinked (eg: backups, LOG etc) are included
verbatim.
My plan was to provide this as a copy mechanism:
- copy cpool using any technique (like cp or rsync) that doesn't
need to preserve hardlinks
- use bin/BackupPC_tarPCCopy to copy the PC directories, and
the tar restore will re-establish the hardlinks into the
existing cpool.
You could also use it to clone a pc tree on the same host, eg:
mkdir newdir
cd newdir
ln -s TOPDIR/cpool
BINDIR/BackupPC_tarPCCopy TOPDIR/pc/HOST | tar xf -
Use tar tvf - instead to see what it is really doing.
Since it knows how files are hashed it doesn't need to search
all of cpool to cache the inodes. That said, I haven't tested
it very much and it is still quite slow because many (most?)
files take a significant disk seek.
As it proceeds it does cache inodes so that the same file can
be immediately matched. The cache is removed on each ARGV.
Using the -c option turns off caching in case the memory
usage is too high.
Craig
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