Re: [Duplicity-talk] hardlinks ?

[Colin Ryan]

Depends what your goal is.

Duplicity does not currently support hard links so if your looking to 
use it as a mechanism to backup the backuppc store then that's no good. 
However you might (depending on the structure of backuppc's store) 
choose to use duplicity against only a particular backup. I do this with 
rdiff-backup.

rdiff backup I use to take efficient archival backups of my source. Then 
I use duplicity to take daily backups of yesterdays rotation. In this 
case it it is convenient that hard links are ignored because duplicity 
sees the particular snapshot directory as fully populated, but because 
they are inode level links it can in turn do it's own differentials 
against the snapshot. So duplicity increments only against files that 
changed since the last rotation even though the rdiff-backup rotated the 
snapshots under the hood...follow? The result is that my rdiff-backups 
are my archival backup but with duplicity I have reasonably efficient 
but encrypted off-site backup of yesterdays rotation as a Disaster 
Recover. Keep in mind that the result makes the off-site not a archival 
backup but as I said simply a current view of the most recent local 
rotation without having to do full's every day.

Seems to work.

karl wrote:
> I have a question about hardlinks.
>
> I currently administer several boxes that use backuppc.  Originally the boxes used 
> rsync over ssh to keep a remote offsite backup of the data.
>
> When I ran accross duplicity, it looked like the perfect solution to use in 
> conjuction with backuppc.
>
> I have come accross the following problem.  Backuppc's incremental backup is 
> actually a full backup that consists of hardlinks to the original full backup.  So 
> when I run duplicity against backuppc's backups the size is many times the size of 
> the original backup.
>
> The question I have is...
>
> Should I look for a way to get Duplicity to recognize hard links
>
> or
>
> should I ditch backuppc and look for another alternative which does not incorporate 
> hardlinks?
>
> If anyone else is using duplicity with another backup solution, I would be most 
> interested.  I may just have to develop my own script to run duplicity on the smb 
> shares which need to be backed up.
>
> Thanks
> Karl
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Duplicity-talk mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/duplicity-talk
>