On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 6:40 AM, Jurie Botha <jurieb AT taprojects.co DOT za> 
wrote:
> I was wondering how viable it would be to backup the backuppc pool using
> tar?
>
> example: tar --preserve-permissions --check-links -cvf
> /mnt/backups/backup2014-04-08.tar /var/lib/backuppc
>
> I know this would become somewhat problematic on big data pools,  so I guess
> my question would be:
>
> Under which circumstances would this method become an issue.
>
> I have a small client, for whom I am using backuppc as a backup solution.
> Unfortunately, setting up an archive host is not an option - so I am at the
> moment just using rsync to copy the pool accross to an external USB 3.0
> Disk. This works fine, the issue is deleting old backups. Each backup of the
> pool goes in its  own dated folder, and deleting one of these takes forever.
> (Due to hardlinks, no doubt :p ) I was thinking of dumping this to a
> uncompressed tar file instead (Deleteing a single file instead of thousands
> of files and more hardlinks.), as in a DR scenario, ultimately as long as
> the data is restore able, time is not so big an issue.
>
> At the moment their pool is sitting at around 100GB.

If the archive stays small enough that rsync works, I'd expect tar to
be about the same in terms of being able to do a (very, very slow)
restore.   However, the easy solution to your problem is to use
several USB drives - which you should be doing with an offsite
rotation anyway if you are thinking DR - instead of keeping multiple
backups in separate folders.  Then you never have to explicitly
delete, and if you did you could just format and start from scratch.
You'll have more of a problem if the archive grows to a point where
rsync -H starts to have trouble.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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