Plan 9 style backup utility for FreeBSD?

[Scott Mitchell]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 09:26:59AM -0800, 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.

Check out rsync and the "--link-dest=DIR" option.  This will hardlink
unchanged files to the previous copy in the link-dest directory, rather
than copying the data again.

	Scott

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell           | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England       | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon