On Sunday 26 May 2024 at 20:37:38, Lars Noodén via Dng wrote:

> On 5/26/24 21:27, Antony Stone wrote:
> > On Sunday 26 May 2024 at 20:08:19, nisp1953 via Dng wrote:
>
> >> I am backing up about 34 GB of data. It's small but important.
> >
> > In that case I would not even consider incremental backups - I would take
> > a full backup every day, and write it to a different directory (or even
> > partition) on the external drive. I cannot imagine you are using disks
> > smaller than 7 x 34 Gb = 238 Gbytes.
>
> Or do something in between via Rsync using the --link-dest option.
>
> I've been using rsync(1) with --link-dest comfortably for quite some
> time now. I use stat(1) and date(1) to find the day of the year from
> the previous run and point rsync(1) to that.

I do that too, however it does:

a) result in the entire archive of "daily backups" occupying a single file
system, and

b) greatly benefit from some advance planning when formatting that file system,
to increase the number of inodes, otherwise you can easily run out of inodes
well before you run out of space (and then spend quite some time trying to
understand the misleading error message "no space left on device").

In my case I:

1. backup my data over the local network to a file system in one partition on
another machine

2. copy that data using rsync with hard links to another file system on a
different partition on the same machine as the backup

The machine holding the backup and the archives has four disks configured as
Raid5 (HP microserver) so even a failure of one disk doesn't affect the data.


Antony.

--
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."

- Ken Olsen, President of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, later consumed
by Compaq, later merged with HP)

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