Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Staged backups

[Ian Jones]

Hello Michael, and thank you for your reply.

Michael Crider a écrit :
> I may not be the most qualified person to answer this, but since nobody
> else has, I'll take a stab at it. There are (at least) two possible
> approaches that you should look at, each with advantages and
> disadvantages. One way would be to set up different backup jobs for
> different directories. With this approach you could stagger backup times
> and even run multiple backups at the same time, although bandwidth, disk
> speed, and CPU speed will all be limiting factors there. This would also
> give you separate rdiff-backup-data directories for each job, for better
> or worse.

The problem with this approach is that I would have to manually keep 
track of the directory structure. While this should not be too 
difficult, the day I forget to add a new top-level directory is sure to 
the very day that a recovery of that directory is required! I was hoping 
to find a way to just have one automated job, once everything had been 
backed-up.

> The second way would be to make a single job that points to /dir, then
> use include statements to get /dir/a, /dir/b, etc., with --exclude '**'
> after those to knock out anything else. There were several backup jobs
> (for several servers on a lan) that I ran first with a single include
> statement, then added an include statement on each run until I had
> everything I wanted. From what I understand of the way rdiff-backup
> works, when a new include statement shows up, it will copy those files
> just like on the first run. Any include statements that were processed
> previously will get a normal backup: librsync will check hash sums of
> all files on both machines and only pass those that have changes, at
> which point rdiff-backup will store the new file and create reverse
> diffs against the old file.

Yes, I think this approach seems the best way.

Another idea I had was to initially use rdiff-backup to backup to a 
local, external disk. Then move the disk to the remote server, and 
continue to use rdiff-backup. Would rdiff-backup use the previously 
created rdiff-backup-data, or create a new one?

Thanks,
Ian.

> Ian Jones wrote:
> > Hello. I have about 20GB of data to backup from a remote site. 
> > Clearly, it's not practical to do this over the Internet in one go, 
> > so I would like to stage the backup over several sessions. So, my 
> > question is: what it the best way to do it? If I backup, say /dir/a, 
> > then subsequently /dir/a and /dir/b, will /dir/a get copied a second 
> > time?
> >
> > An alternative approach would be to make a preliminary backup on DVDs 
> > and copy the files to the backup machine. If I then use rdiff-backup 
> > to do incremental backups, how to I ensure that the files that are 
> > already there are not copied again, i.e. how to I add them to the 
> > archive?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ian.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > rdiff-backup-users mailing list at address@hidden
> > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users
> > Wiki URL: 
> > http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki