Hi, Philippe Rousselot wrote on 2011-06-01 19:47:44 +0200 [[BackupPC-users] moving temporarily PC and pool to an external drive]: > [...] > My hard drives are full and need to add one to have a new and bigger > /var partition. > > In the mean time I would like to continue backing up things using an > external drive
you could simply vgextend your VG onto the external drive. Once you get your new internal drive, you can pvmove the data from the external drive to the internal one(s). If "external" means "USB", you'll probably want to be careful, though, because that isn't exactly famous for its stability. But that warning applies *in any case*. Ah, you're not using LVM. Bad luck. When you get your new disk, you should consider changing that. In fact, if your external disk is large enough (larger than your current pool partition), and you have a bit of time, you could even consider doing that now. Then again, if your external disk really was large enough, you would probably just 'dd' and resize and not try anything complicated. Before we go on, how much time are we talking about? When I think of "getting a new disk", I think of a few hours - 3 days at most, if there's a weekend in the way. Is setting up an interim solution really worth the trouble? > things are actually archived using standard path /var/lib/backuppc/pc/ > and /var/lib/backuppc/pool to the external drive I don't understand what you mean by that. > [...] > I want to replace /var/lib/backuppc/pc/localhost and > /var/lib/backuppc/pool by /media/USBDISK/pool and > /media/USBDISK/pc/localhost Nope. You want to mount your USBDISK on /var/lib/backuppc ... presuming you trust usb-storage enough to proceed. Well, you probably don't have much to lose. The problem is really that you'll start from scratch. No reference backups (the next backup will be a full for all hosts, transferring all data without any rsync savings), no history, no good way to combine that with your present backup history onto the new disk, no pool files (meaning everything will need to be compressed and written to disk, rather than comparing with present files read from disk). You *could* try copying part of your present pool FS onto the external disk, but that really depends on a lot of things (size, xferMethods, reference backup (is the last backup a full?), ...). You most likely won't get anything that will do more than back up files for a few days and be slightly inconsistent (pooling probably won't work correctly, but restores should be fine), but you'll need to do something like this if you have large backup sets and slow links involved. In any case, consider that as a temporary safeguard against data loss only, not as something you'll keep when you move to your new disk. Due to the way BackupPC (pooling, in particular) works, you *can't* move just one part of the pool FS to another file system. If you try just symlinking pc/localhost and pool/ to the external disk, you'll only end up messing up pooling for the other hosts you are backing up. If you need more help, you'll need to explain in much more detail what you want to achieve (rather than what steps you are considering), but don't hesitate to ask. Hope that helps. Regards, Holger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ 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/