[TriLUG] Efficiency of rsync snapshot backups with 'rsback'

David Rasch rasch at raschnet.com
Mon Nov 8 23:24:08 EST 2004


First, Thanks to Jeremy for posting this excellent summary

On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 11:12:32PM -0500, Jeremy Portzer <jeremyp at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> The latter problem could be solved one of two ways:  1) switch to a mail 
> system that doesn't use large spool files, such as Maildir, or 2) switch 
> to a program like "rdiff-backup" that can store the differences in files, 
> rather than having to copy a whole file at a time.  The disadvantage of 1) 
> is that it's a lot of work to switch mail systems, and we like the UW 
> IMAP (in Blackbox mode) as configured.  The disadvantage of 2) is that 
> systems like rdiff-backup require special tools to recover the backed up 
> files.  Our rsback system requires simply "cp" to restore!

I'm a frequent user of rdiff-backup and wanted to point out that you
can restore _any_ file of the most recent backup with a simple "cp"
command.  It's only if you want to restore a file from the older
increments that you must use the "rdiff-backup" tool.  But, as pointed
out the tradeoff is that you only require disk space to store "delta"
(or changes) files between your most recent backup and the changes
between it and the next increment.  

-David
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