Hi,

Steve wrote on 2009-06-02 21:41:56 -0400 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up a 
BackupPC server]:
> I am not a programmer, just a dumb user that thinks the whole thing is
> kinda magic.  So perhaps this is a stupid question.  But since
> BackupPc somehow knows where all the files are and what is linked to
> what etc. why can't there be a button in the CGI interface that
> instead of "restore", says something like, "as of the last inc or
> whatever, make a perfect copy of what i want over here" and just let
> that replicate the pc directories and pool and everything over to the
> backup, offsite, or external drive?

if a problem is hard to solve, putting a button in a CGI interface is not
going to make it any easier. It's not as if we're saying "if we only knew what
BackupPC is doing". We know precisely what it is doing. It is letting the
Linux kernel (or rather the file system) handle some details so that it can
forget about them. That is a good thing. It just turns out that sometimes we
would like to know what BackupPC decided to forget and the file system (or
Linux kernel) wasn't designed to tell us.

> P.S. I have been using this software for about 6 months, love it.  But
> still have not succeeded in backing IT up without a crash.  Have tried
> cp -dpr and also rsync with -H but both bombed out with "too many hard
> links" errors.

Can you tell me more about that (off-list, if you like)? I don't think there
is an error message "too many hard links" for either cp or rsync, so it
probably just died or even crashed the system? Can you give me some details
about your pool (size, number of inodes, how many hosts/backups, number of
directory entries, if you can figure that out)? Where do you want to copy it
to? Another disk accessible to the same computer? Is there a reason not to do
an image copy? How long can you afford to shut down BackupPC for the copy?
Are you willing to try out some code which could turn out not to work
correctly (won't destroy your pool, don't worry :)? How much memory has your
BackupPC server machine got?

> If I could get this backed up i'd say it was the perfect backup solution.

I'm sure we'll find something.

Regards,
Holger

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