On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 10:25 AM, David<wizzardx AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

> Sounds useful, but it doesn't really address my problem of 'du' (and
> locatedb, and others) having major problems with this kind of backup
> layout.
>

A personal desire on your part to use a specific tool to get
information that is presented in other ways hardly constitues a
problem with BackupPC.  The linking structure within BackupPC is the
"magic" behind deduping files.  That it creates a huge number of
directory entries with a resulting smaller number of inode entries is
the whole point.  Use the status pages to determine where your space
is going.  It gives you information about the apparent size (full size
if you weren't de-duping") and the unique size (that portion of each
backup that was new.  This information is a whole lot more useful that
whatever your gonna get from DU.  DU takes so long because its a dumb
tool that does what its told and you are in effect telling it to
iterate accross each server multiple times (1 per retained backup) for
each server you backup.  If you did this against the actual clients
the time would be similiar to doing it against BackupPC's topdir.

As a side note are you letting available space dictate you retention
policy?  It sounds like you don't want to fund the retention policiy
you've specified otherwise you wouldn't be out of disk space.  Buy
more disk or reduce your retention numbers for backups.

Look at the Host Summary page.  Those servers with the largest "Full
Size" or a disspoportionate number of retained fulls/incrementals are
the hosts to focus pruning efforts on. Now select a candidate and
drill into the details for that host.  On the "Host ??? Backup
Summary" page look at the "File Size/Count Reuse Summary" table.  Look
for backups with a large "New Files - Size/MB" value.  These are the
backups where your host gained weight.  You can review the "XferLOG"
to get a list of files in this backup (note the number before the
filename is the file size).  Now you can go to the filesystem and
wholesale delete a backup or pick/choose through a backup for a
particular file (user copies a DVD BLOB to their server).  This wont
immediately free the space (although someone posted a tool that will)
as you will have to wait for the pool cleanup to run.  If its a
particular file, you may need to go through several backups to find
and kill the file (again someone posted a tool to do this I believe).

Voila', you've put your system on a diet, but beware, you do this once
and management will expect you to keep solving their under resourced
backup infrastructure by doing it again and again.  Each time your
forced to make decisions about is this file really junk or might a
user crawl up my backside when they find it can't be restored.  You've
also violated the sanctity of your backups and this could cause
problems if your ever forced to do some foresics on your system for a
legal case.

-- 
Jonathan Craig

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