Slow disk access while rsync - what should I tune?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 12:16 AM, Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown at ru.ac.za> wrote:
> On Sunday 31 October 2010 22:44:25 Matthew Dillon wrote:
>> :> and the output produced by dump is not live-accessible whereas a
>> :> snapshot / live filesystem copy is.  That makes the dump fairly
>> :> worthless for anything other than catastrophic recovery.
>> :
>> :Ever heard of "restore -i"?
>>
>>     Have you ever tried to restore a single file from a 2 Terrabyte dump
>>     file ?  Or even better, if you are using incremental dumps, try
>>     restoring a single file from 6 dump files.
>>
>>     I'm not saying that dump/restore is completely unusable, I'm saying
>>     that it MOSTLY unusable for the use cases people have today for
>> backups.
>
> I'd argue that if you're routinely restoring single files, you aren't managing
> your time or your users' expectations properly.
>
> Backups are /for/ catastrophic recovery, imo, and users shouldn't expect
> systems staff to be routinely restoring single files they've inadvertently
> deleted. Users need to realise that when you delete something it goes away:
> that's what delete does, which is why you're usually asked to confirm it.
>
> Restoring single files for individual users should be very much a special case
> and not a routine service; otherwise you risk being snowed under with file
> recovery requests.

    Isn't that the purpose of periodic snapshots anyhow (restoring a
minimal number of files)?
Thanks,
-Garrett