I might add that if a backup is taking 24 hours, when is the server actually doing any work? during the backup? what happens when files change before the backup is complete? is your backup truly a snapshot of the system?
maybe consider using LVM or something and using a pre-backup command to take a snapshot, then mount that up and do your backup against the RO snapshot.
yeah, its a little off topic but I thought it was relevant.
also, are you compressing the connection? I highly suggest you turn on compression on rsync on this transfer.
another thing to consider here:
keep a copy of the system on the local server and have backuppc backup the directory storing the info.
have that remote server run rsync against it's filesystem back to the backuppc server whenever there is spare bandwidth. you could do something in bash with a while script and iftop or even prioritize a specific port lower and run rsync over that port.
The point is that you could utilize any spare bandwidth throughout the day to get synced up. you could either write a bash script to work as a daemon or just put it in cron with a little bit of logic to make sure that 2 rsyncs dont run at the same time.
I know that technically there is still the same amount of bandwidth available and the same amount of data to be transfered but your backup would be more coherent. it would actually be a snapshot at a specific time.
also, you said your line was 128Kb, is that correct or is it 128KiB ? 128Kb is just 16KiB. I cant imaging running email off of a 16KiB link! I have a 4Mb(512KiB) line for my email server and it is not enough!
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Les Mikesell
<lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
Christian Völker wrote:
> Waking up this thread :)
>
> Ok, we discovered (and meanwhile I saw it on my systems) when doing
> backuo with rsync the first full backup will take several days until
> finished.
>
> Once this is done, every following backup consumes much less bandwith,
> so it succeeds within 24hours.
>
> But what happens to a Windows machine backed up through this line with
> smb? As there is no rsync involved may I assume every full backup needs
> this amount of time?
> And does the smb transfer option start at the last failed backup again
> (just like rsync does)?
No, smb has no way to tell what part of a incomplete backup is good so
it will have to start over every time and probably never succeed. And
subsequent full runs also need to transfer the complete content. If you
don't have enough bandwidth, the best approach for windows would be to
install cygwin rsync in daemon mode and use the rsyncd method in backuppc.
