Peter Walter wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Yeah - but you need physical access to do that, and presumes your 
> storage devices are "real". My needs are to backup a backuppc server 
> where the server doing the backup is at a remote location from the 
> backuppc server, and physical access to either server is difficult - I 
> am dozens (sometimes hundreds) or miles away from either server. In 
> addition, I have access to "cloud storage" I would like to take 
> advantage of, but can't because of the hardlink issue. My (klugey) 
> solution at present is to use a backuppc server to backup the backuppc 
> server, but even incrementals take days to run.

You can always trade bandwidth for access.  If you have sufficient 
bandwidth you can do an image copy anywhere you want - even to a huge 
file in cloud storage.  If you don't have the bandwidth - or enough 
space for that image file, then you need to use something specialized to 
work around your problem, like zfs incremental send/receive.  But, if 
your backup window permits 2 runs, the easy solution is to just run a 
2nd backuppc server hitting the same targets with rsync and forget about 
copying the server itself.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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