Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Using --mirror-only to mirror an rdiff-backup dir

[Ben Escoto]

>>>>> "CS" == Christopher Schanzle <address@hidden>
>>>>> wrote the following on Wed, 15 Jan 2003 06:51:25 -0500

    ...
  CS> I tried using rsync, but it's memory requirements for 8 million
  CS> files is at least 1.3 GB (the second backup host has only
  CS> 512MB...ouch!).  I don't want to break up the rsync into
  CS> multiple subtasks since we have lots of hard links.  I could
  CS> throw more hardware (RAM) at the problem, but...

  CS> I tried to use "rdiff-backup --mirror-only" of the rdiff-backup
  CS> directory to another system.  But I cannot get it to mirror the
  CS> rdiff-backup-data directory since it is automatically excluded!
  CS> I tried --including it, to no avail.  Any suggestions?

You could break this up into two steps, since there will be nothing
hard linked between the rdiff-backup-data directory and the parent
directory.  For instance, in the local case:

rdiff-backup --mirror-only src_dir dest_dir
rdiff-backup --mirror_only src_dir/rdiff-backup-data \
    dest_dir/rdiff-backup-data

I haven't checked this, but it seems like it should work...

  CS> I noticed the release announcement for 0.11.1 -- Ben, please
  CS> reconsider removing the --mirror-only option!  Rsync is not the
  CS> perfect tool for mirroring large datasets!  Does anybody have
  CS> any other suggestions?  And thanks again for all the effort put
  CS> into rdiff-backup.

But you can replicate something like --mirror-only really easily:

rdiff-backup --force src_dir dest_dir
rm -rf dest_dir/rdiff-backup-data

It may seem like a waste to create an rdiff-backup-data directory and
then just delete it, but it's not too bad because a few files are put
in there during an initial backup.  Besides, this way you can fish the
statistics files out of there before you delete it, in case you want a
record.


-- 
Ben Escoto

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