Plan 9 style backup utility for FreeBSD?

paul beard paulbeard at mac.com
Fri Jan 2 14:30:18 PST 2004


On Jan 2, 2004, at 9:26 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:

> I'm finally getting to the point where my disk capacity massively
> outruns my tape capacity, so I'm thinking of converting to removable
> disk-only backup. I could just use Amanda to backup to disk, but I'm
> intrigued by Plan 9's archival filesystem where backups from (say Jan 
> 1,
> 1999) would go in /1999/1/1 and you could just find the files directly
> rather than grovelling through dump files.
>
> Is there some standard tool for doing this on FreeBSD?  You can't just
> do a direct copy cause this results in major disk space wastage so I'm
> imagining you need to use hard links or something to keep the size 
> down.
>

I followed this on your weblog and I may be missing something: I keep 
coming back to some cocktail of find(1), ctime(3), diff(1) and friends 
(pax, tar) to locate and mirror only changed files in a duplicated 
hierarchy. If I'm understanding it, in 1999/1/1 you might have a file 
tree that looks like the "live" one with only files that were modified 
on 1999/1/1, but all other files would be links back to their unchanged 
versions.

I like the idea of it.
--
Paul Beard
<www.paulbeard.org/>
paulbeard [at] mac.com



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