On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 04:30:44PM +0200, Mauro Condarelli wrote:

> >> 1) I have to backup multiple servers and their composed storage exceeds
> >> the capacity of my current backup media (500Gb SATA disk); I will add a
> >> second one and that would be enough (for the time being). Problem is I
> >> would like to avoid using Virtual Volumes (LVM), if at all possible, so
> >> I thought I could backup some servers on one disk and others on the
> >> other, but I don't know how (end if it is possible at all), since I see
> >> only one TopDir setting and nothing comparable in the per-host configs.
> >> How should I proceed?
> > 
> > You can use RAID0 from the md driver without LVM to join the two drives
> > together..... Same result though. You won't get the same benefit of
> > pooling files if you use two separate media, so backuppc requires all
> > backups be stored on the same filesystem.
> If I read You correctly:
> You force users to have a single-filesystem TopDir because in this way
> You can hard-link together identical files; is this correct?

Yes.

I'd suggest just going for LVM. It is rather painless, I _never_ lost
any data because of LVM.

> No way around this? (I do not really care about this optimization
> since my servers do not have many identical files).

Well, if you care, you can keep a lot mor fulls...

> >> 2) I am a bit confused about the schedule configuration. What I would
> >> like to achieve is just a single backup cycle: Full backup once a week
> >> and daily Incremental ones; as soon as I have a complete new Full I want
> >> to discard all old ones (Full & Incremental). What is the right setting
> >> to achieve this?
> > 
> > I don't think backuppc will quite satisfy this requirement. If you keep
> > 2 full backups and 6 incremental backups, then by the time you do the
> > third full backup the oldest full will be discarded. So you can have a
> > minimum of 2 full and 6 incremental (well, you can have 0 incremental
> > and 7 fulls, but your backups will take longer).
> Again, I'm not quite sure I fully understand (or manage to express
> myself fully... after all English is not my first language :) ).
> I did set FullKeepCnt=1, FullKeepCntMin=1, IncrKeepCnt=0 and
> IncrKeepCntMin=0.
> I *hoped* to achieve to always have a single Full, followed by all
> Incremental needed to preserve the last one done.
> What I would like to achieve is the following sequence:
> 
> Sun 1F
> Mon 1F 2I
> Tue 1F 2I 3I
> Wed 1F 2I 3I 4I
> Thu 1F 2I 3I 4I 5I
> Fri 1F 2I 3I 4I 5I 6I
> Sat 1F 2I 3I 4I 5I 6I 7I
> Sun 8F
> Mon 8F 9I
> ...
> 
> The nI incrementals should be preserved only if needed by the (n+1)I.
> 
> Is something like that possible?

Yes, that should be possible exactly as you described it.

> If I have two almost-identical full backups on the same media will
> they pool space or they will use twice the space of a single Full
> backup? (my limited experience seems to point in the direction of
> "twice the space", but I am unsure).

> Sincerely pooling space between successive backups seems to me more
> "interesting" than pooling between possibly unrelated hosts.

Everything in BackupPC pools space. When using rsync for file transfer,
the difference between full and incremental is only that all file checksums 
are compared for full to protect against pool corruption.

So, if you do two fulls, you only need the space for the first full plus
all changed files (plus all directories).

The n+1-th incremental will only transfer the files changed since the n-th
incremental.

Of course, if you use tar or smb for transport, you'll need a lot more
bandwidth since files are actually transfered AFAIK. The BackupPC_link
command should replace them by pooled files after backup.

HTH,

Tino.

-- 
"What we resist, persists." (Zen saying)

www.craniosacralzentrum.de
www.forteego.de

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