Hi, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote on 29.03.2007 at 11:40:59 [Re: [BackupPC-users] BackupPC_tarCreate - make one tar for many hosts (don't loose hardlinks)?]: > Tomasz Chmielewski schrieb: > > Normally, when we use BackupPC's "Archive" functionality, it creates one > > tar (gz|bz2) archive per host. > > > > This way, if the hosts are similar, we loose all hardlinks that BackupPC > > used internally to save us precious space.
this is true even for one host - at least I hope it is :-). You wouldn't want to restore all your CVS/Root files as hardlinks to a common file (this example could actually work in some cases, though ownership and permissions will get in your way even here; other cases of files with identical contents will more obviously not work). > > [...] > > Is there a way to use the "Archive" functionality so that it creates a > > one big tar/gz/bz2 package (probably, in a "native BackupPC format", and > > thus, keeping hardlinks) for all the hosts we want? For the above reason I agree that it would need to be a kind of "native BackupPC format" (otherwise it would not, would it?). > So, tar the latest full backup for all hosts with a single tar command: > > pc/host_1/<latest_full> > pc/host_2/<latest_full> > ... > pc/host_N/<latest_full> > > > > This way, I don't loose hardlinks, and I don't have to > decompress/compress each BackupPC archive to create a new tar archive. > > The question is, can I later on restore such a backup reliably? I'm not sure if you'd need any information from the pc/host_N/backups file. For restoring with the web interface you probably do. You might want to include it (or rather a file containing the relevant line) in your tar file. And what about the configuration (hosts file, config.pl files)? Aside from that, I don't see why it should not work (provided you only include full or filled incremental backups). Are you thinking about using an empty TOPDIR (new installation) for restore or simply untarring into the existing TOPDIR later on, when the backups in question have expired? In either case the files from your tar won't be pooled with other files, so you probably won't want to do more than restore something and delete them again. Or you could extract single files with tar and use BackupPC_zcat to uncompress them. The file meta data is in the attrib file within the tar ... It seems all the information you need is there. If that's your anticipated usage, you'd probably want to script and test it. Regards, Holger ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
