Hi Colin, Thanks for your reply. I'll do as you suggest and transfer my existing key file and cache directory to the new disk.
Regards, John On 24 February 2016 at 20:13, Colin Percival <[email protected]> wrote: > On 02/23/16 08:10, John Gamble wrote: > > I am going to replace my computer's hard disk with a new one and was > wondering > > what I need to do in order to allow Tarsnap backups to continue as > before. > > Can anyone advise on this please? > > > > Here are some specific questions: > > > > 1). Once the new hard disk is installed, do I need to completely > re-install > > Tarsnap from scratch, or can I simply copy across some files to the new > hard disk? > > Install the tarsnap software again. After that, it depends if you want to > continue adding archives to the existing set you have, or start over with > a new archival space. > > If you want to start over, then run tarsnap-keygen as if you've never > created > any archives; that will give you a key file which you can use as before. > (And > then decide what to do with your old archives, whether you want to keep > them > or delete them using the old key.) > > If you want to continue adding archives to your existing set, copy the key > file(s) you were using and the tarsnap cache directory across. > > > 2). Instead of simply copying across some files to the new hard disk, as > > mentioned above, would it be better, from a backup point of view, to copy > > across my entire /home directory to the new disk, rather than individual > > files? (I'm currently running Linux, with my /home directory located on > a > > separate disk partition from the operating system.) > > Tarsnap doesn't care. The deduplication will recognize duplicate data > even if > files move around. > > > 3). I'm replacing a conventional (i.e.spinning) hard disk with a > solid-state > > one. Does that affect Tarsnap at all? > > Yes, tarsnap will be faster. ;-) > > But no, it doesn't affect tarsnap aside from that. > > -- > Colin Percival > Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve > Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid > -- John Gamble, [email protected]
