Re: [rdiff-backup-users] adding --resume back

[Marco Mariani]

On 09/04/2014 12:21 PM, Dominic Raferd wrote:

If you want to do some coding work on rdiff-backup then that would be welcome,
but I think you will be on your own. rdiff-backup is not under active
development at present, sadly.

Yes, I know that, but any suggestion is useful.

<http://www.timedicer.co.uk/programs/help/rdiff-backup-regress.sh.php>.) So in
theory your archive can always be restored to its previous consistent state, but
I am not sure if this can be relied upon if you pile failed session upon failed
session. Even if it does, it isn't much use if your communication drops are so
frequent that you rarely complete a single backup session, because your last
usable backup data might be too old for your purpose.

Not only at the level of backup sessions, I must consider the case of single
files that are so big they won't go though in a single session. The network
may be mobile or in a hostile environment. It may be up only part of the day.
Servers may be restarted or have power failures once per day.

_*Backup to a snapshot*_
If your rdiff-backup repository is on a non-root LVM-based volume, you could try
the following:

   * On the server (destination), create a read/write LVM snapshot of the volume
     holding your (consistent / good) rdiff-backup repository (discarding any
     pre-existing snapshot, and allowing the snapshot plenty of additional space)

[...]

If I had enough space for the LVM snapshot, I would probably rsync the current
data and run rdiff-backup locally on the destination every time rsync succeeds.
This would provide - in our setup - the same protection as LVM with respect
to broken increments, but also resume a partial session after network shortage
and server restarts.

Thanks a lot for your reply, I think that my only option is to change the code.


Regards,
Marco