On Fri 25 Mar 2016, John Long wrote: > > I have been using rsync for many years and never had any kind of problem. > Lately I am running out of RAM trying to do an incremental backup to a box > that only has 2G of RAM. The entire directory structure I'm mirroring is > about 200G of files. A minority of subdirectories have many files. > > Is there a way to do an incremental backup with --delete option that does > not use as much memory? Is there a way to tell rsync to use a tempfile > instead of RAM for keeping tracking of whatever it does?
No to the last question; you could consider adding (more) swapspace to the system, which is effectively like using a tempfile. > And would it be useful to add ignores for the subdirectories I know have > many files and back them up separately? Is --delete safe to use in this > case, as in does --delete with --ignore somedir/ not delete files in other > target dirs that are not in the ignore path? There's no --ignore, you probably mean --exclude. I don't really understand what you're asking in your last question... Why should --exclude somedir/ affect what --delete does elsewhere? --delete will still delete stuff elsewhere if necessary. Also look at the description of --delete and --delete-excluded, if you have any questions about what's in the manpage then feel free to ask those here; but for now I get the impression you haven't spent much time reading the manpage. Paul -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html