On Thursday 01 July 2010 11:31:05 Saturn2888 wrote:
> The rsync command I cron to copy the /var/lib/backuppc directory ...

Stop there. That's your problem. Others here have had luck doing this in under 
24 hours, but my pool takes at least 7 days to copy with rsync. Consider 
cloning the volume and filesystem, which you can't do from ext3 to zfs.

The reason why is hard links:

http://www.tolaris.com/2010/04/23/using-lvm-to-make-a-live-copy-of-a-backuppc-
pool/

> My main question pertains to the pool and the cpool. What is the purpose of
>  these directories? Are they recreated when the nightly jobs runs?

No, they are created as backups run, and actually contain your files. The pool 
is uncompressed, and is used if you disable compression. The cpool is 
compressed. Generally only one is in use, but if you ever turned compression 
on and off you'll have files in both. The pool/cpool is very important. Do not 
remove it.

When you back up a host, unique files are copied to the pool. Existing files 
just get hard links into the pool's existing file. Therefore the files under 
pc/host/backupnumber are hard links into the pool.

> For instance, I'm under the impression the way to delete a host, you remove
>  the pc/host folder and then you go into the main configuration and remove
>  the host from there as well. What happens to the pool in this instance?

That is the way to remove a host, yes. However, its files still exist in the 
pool until the next BackupPC_nightly run, which will purge them. This make 
take several runs depending on BackupPCNightlyPeriod.

> Let's say the drive for my BackupPC server dies, and I cannot recover the
>  data because someone smashed the drive with a hammer, if I wanted to
>  re-add hosts, and I only had backed up the pc folder, wouldn't that be
>  sufficient or would all the de-duplicated file processing be lost?

The de-duplicated file processing would be lost. You could restore that one 
host/backup, though. I'm not sure if the BackupPC interface would function 
enough to do it, but perhaps the scripts would.

Regards,
Tyler

-- 
"Standard creepiness rule: don't date under (AGE/2 + 7)."
   -- Randall Munroe, XKCD, http://xkcd.com/314/

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