Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Splitting large initial backup?

[Michael Hannon]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 05:14:24PM -0500, Richard Crane wrote:
> I have a ~400GB partition that will take, based on smaller jobs,  
> about 32 hours for the initial copy. I would like to split this into  
> several partial jobs but there doesn't seem to be any way to join  
> them back together, so that subsequently I can run a single job to  
> increment everything.
> 
> E.g:  source contains
> /top/A
>     /B
>     /C
> ...
> 
> I tried
> rdiff-backup --include /top/A --exclude /top/* source::/top backup/
> rdiff-backup --include /top/B --exclude /top/* source::/top backup/
> 
> -- of course, /top/A was deleted ( duh!)
> 
> What if I do
> 
> rdiff-backup --include /top/A --exclude /top/* source::/top backup/
> rdiff-backup --include /top/A /top/B --exclude /top/* source::/top  
> backup/
> ....
> 
> Obviously I'll pick up changes in the prior sections with each  
> successive jobs, but there will be few changes over the several days  
> this takes.
> 
> Or, can I remove the rdiff-backup-data directories at some point and  
> have rdiff-backup build a new one, once all the files are copied for  
> he first time?

Hi, Richard.  I think that the rsync and --force approach suggested by
someone else is a good idea, but in the past I've done the kind of thing
you're talking about just by adding subdirectories a few at a time to a
filelist file, then running rdiff repeatedly until I finally got all the
files.  Here's the command (slightly edited):

/usr/bin/rdiff-backup  --terminal-verbosity 4 --print-statistics
--include-globbing-filelist /usr/local/bin/rd-filelist --exclude '**'
/home address@hidden::/backup/rd-user/primarysys/home

This should all go on one line.  The rd-filelist file looks like:

    /home/user1
    /home/user2
    /home/user3
    /home/user4
    /home/user5
    .
    .
    .

                                        - Mike
-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:address@hidden
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677