On 12/21 03:14 , hansbkk AT gmail DOT com wrote:
> The least critical are of course media files, and in fact they don't
> even really need to be stored on hard disk space, as I've been
> archiving to DVD as I've been collecting/converting. They
> **certainly** don't need to take up my valuable NAS space more than
> once - in other words, if I do choose to store the more valuable files
> there, they should not be backed up any further.
So are you saying that you don't want CD/DVD images backed up to BackupPC at
all?
> So here's my question - is it possible to set up a separate directory
> "media tree" within the BackupPC pool's filesystem that is explicitly
> intended to be exposed to "regular users" as a network share (could be
> via samba, nfs or even offered up by a "check-in/out" web front end)?
I do not understand what you are asking.
Are you just looking to use some of the partition that BackupPC uses to
store its data, as another network-accessible storage space? (presumably
because it has a lot of disk space).
It's certainly possible; and to my chagrin management has made me do similar
things. It makes it much harder to do maintenance on the BackupPC server,
because you might not be able to do it during normal work hours, and need to
schedule a special time like you do with other 'critical' fileservers.
I advise against it if you can help it; but you certainly can create a new
directory under /var/lib/backuppc, and share that directory out via NFS or
SMB.
> The goal is to ensure that to the extent users have copies of these
> files on their local filesystems, they aren't going to slow down the
> backup sessions, as they'll already exist in the pool. If this isn't a
> good idea, perhaps having such a folder tree "off to the side" from
> BackupPC's pool but still in the same filesystem would work in
> conjunction with periodically running one of the "dedupe/hardlinking"
> scripts - any particular one recommended to use with BackupPC's pool?
If I am understanding you correctly; the answer is 'no'. You can probably
theoretically run some external script to link outside files into the
BackupPC data pool; but it's likely to have all kinds of bad results because
it's such an unusual thing to do (and may not be worthwhile anyway).
> I'm going to set up and train users to use a top-level "don't back up
> this tree" folder on their local filesystems, where they should be
> placing unimportant but humungous files like these. However as we all
> know, users will follow such a scheme inconsistently at best.
My experience is that users barely know what file size is. Remember that
Windows hides it.
> Which brings my next question - can anyone suggest a way to alert the
> sysadmin (me) that a user did (mistakenly) have one of these ginormous
> files in the filesystem being backed up? I'm guessing some sort of
> cron-triggered script looking for new hardlinks to existing files
> within my "media tree", ideally indicating the user and the file's
> location in their filesystem.
I can't think of one right now; but perhaps someone else here has written
such a think.
> PS I never got a direct answer to my question about backing
> up/transferring BackupPC's filesystem (but thanks to Pavel about
> mentioning his RAID method)
I've done it with netcat+dd. It's really simple & fast that way.
--
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com
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