Assuming you are using BackupPC 3.x... which is based on hard links... You can't "just" copy over and merge backups... Rather there are links and pool/cpool chains and several other complexities.
I did write and post some routines that can do this by essentially looking up each file, searching the pool for a match, and then either replacing the 'pc' file with a hard link to an existing pool file or creating a new link depending on whether the file already exists in the pool. There are also several edge cases to be careful of. This is of course a slow process and not recommended unless you really really understand the structure of the backup storage and know what you are doing (which clearly you don't :) Laurence Hurst wrote at about 19:11:02 +0000 on Sunday, January 12, 2020: > Hi I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what I've done and/or where > my expectations are wrong. > > Bit of background: I've found some old disks that belonged to a BackupPC > pool, which contained amongst other things copies of some coding > projects I thought I'd lost the source for many years ago. I've copied > them into my existing backuppc pool, along with the relevant pc > directories and configurations, so I can access them. > > I've started restoring some of the file to a directory onto my current > machine, using a direct restore. I was expecting to be able to restore > the files, rescue what I needed and delete the original 'pc' from > BackupPC without having much impact on the pool since all of the files > are already in there, so interim backups of my current machine should > just create new links to the files I've recovered via BackupPC's restore > feature. However, when the next backup of my current machine happened > only about 50% of the files were found as 'existing files', the other > 50% came out as 'new files' (and now my pool disk is 95% full as nearly > 200GB of data that should already be in the pool has been duplicated). > > This is where I'm confused: Why would files restored directly from > BackupPC and not subsequently touched in any way (not even viewed or > moved/renamed) not be found as existing files in the pool? Compression > was turned on for both pools (the original and the new one). > > Any ideas? > > Thanks, > > Laurence > > > _______________________________________________ > BackupPC-users mailing list > BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net > List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net > Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
