Steve wrote:
> 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?

The problem is that there is no good mechanism to find the "other" names 
  that are hardlinked together.  Normally you don't need to know - 
except when you are trying to copy the whole thing maintaining 
consistency.  The not-so-good way to do it is to build a table of names 
and inode numbers for the whole tree and link the names with matching 
inodes as they are copied.  As you may have noticed, this doesn't scale 
very well.

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

Rsync 3.x with plenty of RAM on both systems might have a chance. But 
assuming you put the backup archive on its own partition, you can 
unmount it and use some form of image copy of the raw device (dd to 
another matching disk, dd to a file, or over ssh to a file or device on 
another machine, etc.)   Clonezilla would probably work if you don't 
mind rebooting from a CD while the copy is made - it will offer to copy 
to another local disk or to an image with various forms of network 
access (cifs/nfs/sshfs) which you can restore on another machine the 
same way - or just save in case you need it later.

Or, use a raid mirror that you break periodically and rotate drives. 
I've described my approach several times.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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