Hi Les!Thank you for the input.Well all I see is that incremental backup with rsync can take 3 hours for 750 MB (30 mbit/sec bandwidth, strong computers), which is absolutely crazy. With tar this is 5 minutes at max.
So you can see my concerns
And I have a server where the full backup took about 72 hours.I wanted the backuppc machine (with 6 TB HDD) to be able to backup all my servers (there are many), but if backing up of 1 server can take days with incremental, then this is not a solution.
Seperation is possible, I had many shares for rsync to handle, but there are some where the seperation would be a real pain in the *ss, for instance /home etc.On the other hand, tar would have been really nice, but the deleted files problem makes it almost useless for my intentions.
I am really sad about this, because the software is really cool, I like the web interface, I like the command line scripts, I like everything.Only this deletion problem... This should be top priority, and should already be in the software
(I mean I know it is open source etc and that I did not develop it, but it's a feature I think many of us would like and that would really make it
a much heavier software for the whole world.The truth is that I have been experimenting with many backup solutions in the past, and they are either very complicated to handle (bacula), or aren't reliable. BackupPC was the numero uno, until I discovered this. It can even work together with autoloaders,
there are scripts on the net for this, so it would have been real neat.I will have to use dar, which is a solution that never let me down, but needs a BackupPC-like interface too :-)It uses catalogs, thus incrementals are real fast, everything is nice with it, just it's a bit more time consuming to set up nicely and in my case, needs software on client and server side.
Thanks for taking the time, I will be watching BackupPC features in the future, I hope it will handle this tar problem soon :-)Regards,Daniel>On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Daniel <dandadude < at > ...> wrote:
I have started using backuppc at first with rsync, but backing up servers
with millions of small files took very much time (days). This would be
normal, but the incremental backups took almost the same time, which is not
normal.
Rsync incrementals still compare the directories to detect deletions
and new files with old timestamps. But it should still be much faster
than a full unless much of the data has changed since the previous
full. Is there any way you can break the runs up into smaller ones
of separate directories?
I have then read that I should use tar as backup method, because the
incremental backups will be much faster. I have tested this and it is true,
much-much-much faster!!!
I have then realized that tar does not store deleted file information in the
incremental backups which is a real pain in the *ss, because when my clients
ask me to restore a state, they will surely hate me if I restore the deleted
files too.
Am I right that there is no way to keep track of deleted files?
Only rsync does it in backuppc.
If yes, aren't there somekind of alternative ways? For instance a directory
tree pre-script that uses catalogs?
The best would be if backuppc+tar could use catalog files or something.
Or if backuppc would be able to utilize dar as a backup solution, now that
would really be nice, because dar uses catalogs.
Please comment on my problem!
GNUtar has a mechanism to track deletions and which files are included
(the --listed-incremental= option) but backuppc doesn't use it.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > ...
