Jason B wrote: > close to > the same way as an incremental, except it's more useful, so to say? > > Incidentally, unrelated, but something that's been bugging me for a while: > subsequent full backups hardlink to older ones that have the true copy of the > file, correct? That means there is no meaningful way of deleting an older > backup, as the parent files may be lost, rendering future links useless? > > Not quite - if it were symlinks that would be true but BackupPC uses hard links - with a hard link the underlying inode (which describes the file data) persists as long as there is at least one link to it. When old backups get purged what really happens is they gut unlinked (doing rm -rf on a numbered backup in the directory for an individual pc has the same effect). If all the numbered backups that reference a file get removed then only a single link (from the pool tree) will remain. The nightly cleanup code looks for files with one link and removes them. So you can safely delete older backups knowing that only files that are unique to that backup will disappear (and also knowing that you won't get the disk space backup until after the nightly cleanup).
John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
