Les Mikesell wrote at about 14:05:27 -0500 on Monday, August 31, 2009:
 > Peter Walter wrote:
 > > For me, the matter could be resolved if a 
 > > way was found to at least backup a backuppc server in a reasonable 
 > > fashion without requiring particular filesystems and utilities such as 
 > > zfs send/receive.
 > 
 > But there is a reasonable way: unmount the partition and image-copy the 
 > raw disk or partition.  Given that the issue with other approaches is 
 > that the head has to seek all over the place to access the same amount 
 > of data through the filesystem, this solves the problem neatly with one 
 > linear pass.  Or, get the same effect by raid-mirroring to your backup 
 > device so you only have to unmount momentarily to fail/remove the other 
 > copy.   Zfs improves on this since it has an incremental mode that is 
 > still based on the block device.
 > 

This still is not a solution for all of us. First, I store the backups
on a consumer-level NAS device that does not easily facilitate adding
partitions without additional hacking and risks to data integrity. The
device also does not support LVM. I do not want to have copy a whole
1TB partition just to copy over a few hundred GB of backuppc
data. Second, at some point, I may want to move the pool to another
drive or server and I don't want to have to fiddle with low level block
copy and partition resizing in the hope that I can get it right
without making mistakes in either the partition itself, the underlying
LVM setup, or the further underlying (software) RAID setup -- I have
done this manually before and it takes real care to get the sequence
right and not do something stupid.

Finally, at a minimum, the installation document for BackupPC should
clearly warn users to use a dedicated partition with LVM for TopDir if
they want to have any hope of practically backing up, transferring, or
expanding their backup directory in the future.

I really fail to understand the dogged resistance to finding a viable
solution to a well-known and repeated issue with BackupPC that does
not rely on filesystem level kludges. I could see if this were given
as a temporary workaround but why should we continue to see this as
the ideal solution rather than trying to work on a more robust and
comprehensive solution even if it falls to a long-term roadmap item.

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