My advice is to just do a 3 way rsync. That way you can find and restore your backed up files without any special tools, reducing the risk of the backup tool either trashing your data or the backups (rdiff-backup deleted all my backups while doing a backup)
Hard links used in a 3 way rsync (the 3rd way being a reference to the last non-incremental backup) mean you save space for unchanged files. You won't get the space saving when large files change slightly, but that is more than made up for by not getting the space back when rdiff-backup deletes all your data. Sam -----Original Message----- From: Warren Guy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: 17 March 2008 02:51 To: [email protected] Subject: [rdiff-backup-users] external hard disk backups - best practice mortee wrote: > Thanks. However, the real problem here is that the backup disk is a > NetBSD FFS2, which unfortunately does a much more thorough job when > deleting files/directories. Namely, it literally erases all metadata > regarding the stuff, so, although the file data blocks are still > physically on the disk, I can't even determine which ones used to belong > to one file, not to mention file names and directory structure. It would While this won't help you get your data back, perhaps a point that can be made from your unfortunate story is the importance of maintaining more than one set of backups. A second backup set would potentially allow recovery of data in this and other circumstances where recovery from another backup disk fails for whatever reason. Perhaps others can add other "best practice" tips they have, for the benefit of current and future readers of the list? Warren _______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
