I've been using this excellent script for over a year now to back up my entire system, including Ubuntu 10.04 as a host for VirtualBox and two Windows virtual machines. I've had a few problems, and...
Type: Posts; User: david.macquigg; Keyword(s):
I've been using this excellent script for over a year now to back up my entire system, including Ubuntu 10.04 as a host for VirtualBox and two Windows virtual machines. I've had a few problems, and...
Nice research, Silver. I did some more tests (see below), and my hypothesis that du is simply looking at the link counts on each file is wrong. I'm leaning now toward the explanation that du keeps...
Except that I don't think there is actually a table of links anywhere. "stat filename" shows the total number of links to filename, but not any information about each link. Is there any other...
I agree that's a good brief explanation for regular users. For those of us who like to understand what's going on behind the scenes, it won't help. I'm still puzzling over the details of how these...
I found the source of my original problem with RLB, and I have now switched back to the original script, which does not use "cp -al" before the rsync command. See the recent posts to...
It looks like the du command is doing something more sophisticated than just looking at the link count. Here are some tests I just ran on a sequence of four backups using the original script. The...
Interesting observation. However, I don't think du can figure out which directory entries are for original files, and which are links. All it sees is a link pointing to a file, and a field with the...
Note: Skip this post. I think I found the problem. My backup partition is of type NTFS. I tried an Ext4 partition, and the original script seems to work. I'll do some more experiments and confirm...
See my last post at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=912460&page=2 for some typical performance measurements. This is actually a second internal drive. I assume a USB drive would be slower,...
My last backup took an hour and 50 minutes, transferring 2476 files, total 160MB. Then it took an additional 51 minutes to check the disk usage. du reports 206M, so I assume 46M is in the directory...
I was mistaken. "cp -al" does *not* making hardlinks to directories. It does on my Mac, but not on my Ubuntu system. "ls -l" shows only one link to each directory in the backup copies. That means...
readlink does the trick. Thanks. Here are my diffs, if anyone wants to experiment with RLBackup.
161c163
< OPT_LINKDEST=--link-dest=$DESTPATH/current-0
---
> #...
Excellent script. I really like the logging features. There seems to be a problem with the --link-dest option in rsync, however. It is really slow, and makes the backup consume a lot of space on...
backintime looks nice, but it is just a GUI frontend for rsync, which I don't really need, because I won't be needing interaction with my backup script. A well-written script should be as easy to...
I've got some results comparing Charles' method to that in RLBackup. Using cp -al to set up the link tree *before* the rsync command is orders of magnitude faster and smaller than using the...
Vegan, gzipped tar files are really inconvenient for browsing and recovering a single file from an old backup. rsync was designed as an alternative. Each of us has different expectations, but for my...
OK, there are no links to directories, therefore, every backup must include a copy of every directory in the tree that is backed up. Try backing up a large tree like my earlier example, after...
How do I make a hard link to a directory?
$ ln /home/david
ln: hard link not allowed for directory
I don't see how cp -al can help, since each incremental backup must include fresh copies of all directories in the tree, even when none of the files have changed. How does your script avoid making...
If I rsync to the same destination folder each time, no space is wasted, but older versions are lost. Time Machine allows me to recover files from any time in the past.
I think the key to...
SANs, RAID arrays, Kickstart - this is all overkill for a small office with three computers and no sysadmin. I need something like Time Machine on the Mac, backing up everything automatically every...
Paul, thanks for the tips on setting up fstab, grub, etc. I did a little more searching and found a discussion of these procedures at...
rsync sure seems like the best way to do backups for anyone who can write a script, or even just modify one that somebody else has written. Certainly no more difficult than figuring out all the...
Shell script languages are really terrible for solving problems like this. Compared to a real language, like Python, they have very little power, lots of useless complexity, and are not portable to...
TP, thank you for at last answering my question why anyone would prefer dual boot over VirtualBox. I have not encountered these problems myself, but that may be because I am not pushing the limits. ...