Folks, Kevin Korb wrote:
Have you considered more advanced methods such as subvolume snapshots provided by ZFS and BTRFS? At work we were forced to abandon rsync - --link-dest because of the amount of time it takes to delete old backups when the data is primarily many millions of small files (shared web hosting company).
We don't have more advanced methods like subvolume snapshots available to us. However, we can recycle backup directories. When we started using rsync with --link-dest back in about 2007, we deleted old backups, but realised soon after that we could recycle old backups. With daily backups, we find about 1.5% of the data and 0.5% of the files change from one day to the next, so a directory from about 5 days ago will typically be only 5-10% wrong and can be recycled to be the target of the latest directory - that's a lot better than recreating the whole directory tree for a new backup, and then deleting a whole old directory tree. We use --delete of course. Hope this helps someone. Rob. Dr Robert C. Bell HPC National Partnerships | Scientific Computing Information Management and Technology CSIRO T +61 3 9669 8102 Alt +61 3 8601 3810 Mob +61 428 108 333 robert.b...@csiro.au<mailto:robert.b...@csiro.au> | www.csiro.au | wiki.csiro.au/display/ASC/ Street: CSIRO ASC Level 11, 700 Collins Street, Docklands Vic 3008, Australia Postal: CSIRO ASC Level 11, GPO Box 1289, Melbourne Vic 3001, Australia PLEASE NOTE The information contained in this email may be confidential or privileged. Any unauthorised use or disclosure is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please delete it immediately and notify the sender by return email. Thank you. To the extent permitted by law, CSIRO does not represent, warrant and/or guarantee that the integrity of this communication has been maintained or that the communication is free of errors, virus, interception or interference. Please consider the environment before printing this email. -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
