rsync and moving files [Re: backup w/ snapshots]
Svein Halvor Halvorsen
svein-freebsd-questions at theloosingend.net
Mon Aug 29 15:12:31 GMT 2005
* Norberto Meijome [2005-08-30 00:32 +1000]
> isn't that the whole point of having a backup? to have *another* copy of your
> files?
Well, yes and no.
The idea is that I have a main computer that I want to backup. I want the
backup to be (a) remote, (b) incremental and (c) random-accessible.
So I thought that every day my backup-server could rsync my main computer,
creating a mirror of the relevant directory trees. Then, as soon as the
rsync job completes, it takes a snapshot of the filesystem. This snapshot
could be mounted r/o and nfs-exported back to the original computer.
Now: If I have a file /foo/test on my main computer. After the first
rsync-job this file will be copied, assigned an inode and put on the disk
somewhere. If I change this file, a local snapshot will be smart enough to
just store the changed sectors that this file now occupies.
But: If I move the file from /foo/test to /bar/test on my main computer,
rsync will create a BRAND NEW FILE in /bar (and delete the file in /foo,
since I used the --delete option). Now this NEW file will have a new
inode, and cover new sectors on disk. The snapshot will then tak
considerable more diskspace. If I move a large directory tree this way,
this will occupy huge amounts of diskspace.
If I however, make the snapshot on my local disk, this is not a problem,
as on this local filesystem /bar/test is not a new file.
So how can I make rsync know that the files were just moved (renamed,
relinked), and make rsync reflect this fact on the remote mirror?
> and I guess that yes, if the files are new in the remote system, when you
> take a snapshot the difference with the previous snapshot will be the size of
> the new data
The files aren't new. Their names are!
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