On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 09:33:47AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote: > On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 11:22:10AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > Robin Lee Powell wrote: > > > On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 10:20:46AM +0100, Nils Breunese > > > (Lemonbit) wrote: > > >> It is generally believed on this list (I believe) that it's not > > >> feasible to use something as 'high-level' as rsync to replicate > > >> BackupPC's pool. The amount of memory needed by rsync will just > > >> explode because of all the hardlinks. Usually people have been > > >> using low-level tools like dd or dump to copy a complete pool > > >> filesystem to another one. > > > > > > Then this list believes wrongly; I've had no problems doing it > > > at all, for some weeks now. It's the getting it encrypted part > > > that's tricky. > > > > > > rsync has to think for a while, but it works, and I've never > > > noticed any memory problems on that machine. The machine does > > > have 2GiB of RAM, however. > > > > It will work up to some limit on filenames and hardlinks that > > backuppc archives are likely to exceed. There are 2 issues - > > there is a fixed memory overhead per filename that is handled in a > > single run and the mechanism to match up the linked files doesn't > > scale well. > > My backuppc pool and pc directories together have 2442024 files, and > 10325584 KiB of data. While I accept that it's possible for one's > backups to scale beyond the point where rsync can handle them, as I > said, I've had no problems so far.
Also, I said my machine had 2GiB of RAM earlier, but I ran this on a different machine yesterday with the same file pool: MemTotal: 451348 kB I think rsync's hardlink fixing isn't as inefficient as you think it is. -Robin -- Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/ http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
