rwk AT americom DOT com wrote:

The basic way is to use gnutar as the backup program and NOT back up
the entire FS, but create a series of disklist entries which back up
a sub-tree of the total system.  For example if your big FS mounts as
/big_mama, and has subdirs of /big_mama/proj1, /big_mama/proj2, ...
you could specifiy a separate DLE for each "projx" directory tree.

It's videos and they are 1G to 5G each all in one directory.  The
program which creates them (mythtv) gives them files names which are
numbers, so they are not as easy to divide into categories like you
suggest, but I'm sure there is a way.

There is a possible approach using GNUTAR and the "include" directive
together with explicit diskname + diskdevice in your disklist.

Your disklist would look like:

fatboy  /bigmama_BIGDIR  /bigmama {     # a big subdirectory
        comp-user-tar
        include "./bigdir"
        }
fatboy  /bigmama_FILES01 /bigmama {     # all files beginning with...
        nocomp-user-tar
        include "./file[01]*"
        }
fatboy  /bigmama_FILES23 /bigmama {
        nocomp-user-tar
        include "./file[23]*"
        }
...
fatboy  /bigmama_REST /bigmama {        # Catch-all
        nocomp-user-tar
        exclude "./file[0-9]*"
        exclude append "./bigdir"
        }

The disknames e.g. /bigmama_FILES23 are just labels and need to be uniq.
The trick here lies in finding the patterns that divide the filesystem
in chunks that fit on one tape.  (I wonder what happens if the "include"

did not specify in the previous includes.

You would probably also increase the "maxdumps" parameter, assuming
your machine is fast enough.

Not very elegant, but while waiting when someone finally manages to
adapt amanda to span tapes...


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
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