Timothy J Massey wrote at about 23:13:52 -0500 on Tuesday, February 22, 2011:
> Dennis Blewett <dennis.blew...@gmail.com> wrote on 02/22/2011 10:17:29 PM:
>
> > 13,849 items, totalling 3.8 GB
> >
> > It would appear that I have a feasible number of files. I'm not sure
> > how many more files I will have by the end of April, though.
> >
> > I've read about that "rsync -H" would be a practical command to use
> > on the backuppc folder.
> >
> > What I'm also curious about is if I should be rsyncing any other
> > files, thus allowing me to restore from the offsite backup in the
> > case I lose everything and rebuild a backuppc configuration: I would
> > attempt to rsync back to my computer with the new backuppc
> > configuration and attempt to restore/recover said files.
>
> Please Google this and read the results: this question has been asked
> dozens of times, and always boils down to the same points. I will sum it
> up *briefly*:
>
> * For most people, rsync does not work to replicate a backup server
> effectively. Period. I think *no* one would suggest this as a reliable
> ongoing method of replicating a BackupPC server. Ever.
>
> * The best methods for this boil down to two camps:
> 1) Run two BackupPC servers and have both back up the hosts
> directly
> No replication at all: it just works.
> 2) Use some sort of block-based method of replicating the data
>
> * Block-based replication boils down to two methods
> 1) Use md or dm to create a RAID-1 array and rotate members of
> this array in and out
> 2) Use LVM to create snapshots of partitions and dd the partition
> to a different drive
> (I guess 3) Stop BackupPC long enough to do a dd of the partition
> *without* lVM)
>
I think there is a 3rd camp:
3. Scripts that understand the special structure of the pool and pc
trees and efficiently create lists of all hard links in pc
directory.
a] BackupPC_tarPCCOPY
Included in standard BackupPC installations. It uses a perl
script to recurse through the pc directory, calculate (and
cache if you have enough memory) the file name md5sums and
then uses that to create a tar-formatted file of the hard
links that need to be created. This routine has been
well-tested at least on smaller systems.
b] BackupPC_copyPcPool
Perl script that I recently wrote that should be significantly
faster than [a], particularly on machines with low memory
and/or slower cpus. This script creates a new temporary
inode-number indexed pool to allow direct lookup of links and
avoid having to calculate and check file name md5sums. The
pool is then rsynced (without hard links -- i.e. no -H flag)
and then the restore script is run to recreate the hard
links. I recently used this to successfully copy over a pool of
almost 1 million files and a pc tree of about 10 million files.
See the recent archives to retrieve a copy.
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