Timothy J Massey wrote at about 23:13:52 -0500 on Tuesday, February 22, 2011:
 > Dennis Blewett <dennis.blewett AT gmail DOT com> wrote on 02/22/2011 
 > 10:17:29 PM:
 > 
 > > 13,849 items, totalling 3.8 GB
 > > 
 > > It would appear that I have a feasible number of files. I'm not sure
 > > how many more files I will have by the end of April, though.
 > > 
 > > I've read about that "rsync -H" would be a practical command to use 
 > > on the backuppc folder.
 > > 
 > > What I'm also curious about is if I should be rsyncing any other 
 > > files, thus allowing me to restore from the offsite backup in the 
 > > case I lose everything and rebuild a backuppc configuration: I would
 > > attempt to rsync back to my computer with the new backuppc 
 > > configuration and attempt to restore/recover said files.
 > 
 > Please Google this and read the results:  this question has been asked 
 > dozens of times, and always boils down to the same points.  I will sum it 
 > up *briefly*:
 > 
 > * For most people, rsync does not work to replicate a backup server 
 > effectively.  Period.  I think *no* one would suggest this as a reliable 
 > ongoing method of replicating a BackupPC server.  Ever.
 > 
 > * The best methods for this boil down to two camps:
 >         1) Run two BackupPC servers and have both back up the hosts 
 > directly
 >                 No replication at all:  it just works.
 >         2) Use some sort of block-based method of replicating the data
 > 
 > * Block-based replication boils down to two methods
 >         1) Use md or dm to create a RAID-1 array and rotate members of 
 > this array in and out
 >         2) Use LVM to create snapshots of partitions and dd the partition 
 > to a different drive
 >         (I guess 3) Stop BackupPC long enough to do a dd of the partition 
 > *without* lVM)
 > 

I think there is a 3rd camp:
  3. Scripts that understand the special structure of the pool and pc
         trees and efficiently create lists of all hard links in pc
         directory.
         a] BackupPC_tarPCCOPY
                Included in standard BackupPC installations. It uses a perl
                script to recurse through the pc directory, calculate (and
                cache if you have enough memory) the file name md5sums and
                then uses that to create a tar-formatted file of the hard
                links that need to be created. This routine has been
                well-tested at least on smaller systems.

        b] BackupPC_copyPcPool
           Perl script that I recently wrote that should be significantly
           faster than [a], particularly on machines with low memory
           and/or slower cpus. This script creates a new temporary
           inode-number indexed pool to allow direct lookup of links and
           avoid having to calculate and check file name md5sums.  The
           pool is then rsynced (without hard links -- i.e. no -H flag)
           and then the restore script is run to recreate the hard
           links. I recently used this to successfully copy over a pool of
           almost 1 million files and a pc tree of about 10 million files.
           See the recent archives to retrieve a copy.
 

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