ZFS backups: retrieving a few files?

[Thomas Ronner]

On 11/23/10 4:45 PM, Freddie Cash wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:56 AM, Thomas Ronner<thomas at ronner.org>  wrote:
>> rsync -avHxS --delete --numeric-ids /src/. /dst/.

> One problem with using rsync when dealing with hard-linked files:  it
> doesn't like it when the source switches from hard-linked to
> non-hard-linked files.  You end up with a mix of hard-linked and
> non-hard-linked files in the destination, with the contents of the
> non-hard-linked files all mixed around.
>
> We just discovered this when we upgraded our Debian 4.0 (Etch) boxes
> to Debian 5.0 (Lenny).  On Etch, all the gzip tools are hard-links
> (zcat, zless, gzip, gunzip, etc).  On Lenny, they are all separate
> files, and most are just shell scripts that use gzip.  Doing an rsync
> of a Lenny box onto a directory from an Etch box, you end up with some
> hard-linked files, some regular files, and the contents of all the
> files are mixed-up based on which source file (script or binary) was
> read first.
>
> We've had to resort to clearing out the backups directory when doing a
> Debian upgrade, in order to guarantee that we get a clean backup via
> rsync.


Thanks for this info! I'm going to try to reproduce this.


Thomas.