Re: [rdiff-backup-users] State of the rdiff-backup project

[Frank Crawford]

Yves,

I don't think it is a major issue for you, unless you are regularly linking and unlinking files.  While I haven't studied the code, what I believe it is taking about is that when an archive is first made it will duplicate hard-links, if they exist in the source, unless --no-hard-links is specified.

However, during regression, if the change was the deletion of one of the linked files, it will not relink it, but create the file as a separate file.  This is not surprising as finding related linked files is a very hard problem, involving searching the entire archive, each time.

However, these days, hard links are not that common, as most people prefer symbolic links.

Also, ultimately, when you finally expire old archives, both copies of the files will be removed, so it is not that you will lose space long-term.

If you do want to see how common links are on your computer you can run something like:

find / -type f -links +1 -ls

and then try it on the areas that you usual have changes in, e.g. /home.

Regards

Frank

On Sat, 2015-08-15 at 10:30 +0200, Yves Martin wrote:

  Hello,

I just read "regress.py" and I am concerned by this comment:

<<

Currently this does not recover hard links.  This may make the

regressed directory take up more disk space, but hard links can still

be recovered.

As I use rdiff-backup for my own laptop backups, it "often" fails and

regress for many reasons (no more disk space, got into sleep state...)

So do I understand well that there is a potential disk space leak in my

repository after multiple regressions leaving "non recovered hard

links" ?

If so, how should I evaluate this disk space loss and eventually recover

it "by hand" ?

Regards