On 20150223_1014+0100, Petter Adsen wrote: > I hope someone can help me out a bit with this, I'm not an expert on > filesystems. > > I want to set up a small (~300G) drive for online backups, taken with > backintime from a nightly cron job. backintime uses rsync/hard links to > take the backups, so there will be a lot of links. The source of the > backup is mainly small files, and many of them don't change that > frequently. > > What I'm wondering is this: what should I set blocksize, inode count > and inode ratio etc to? Also, would ext4 be a good fs to choose, or are > there better alternatives? >
I don't use Backintime. I use Rsync directly with a tiny Bash script that I have written. A snapshot of a 100 Gigabyte file system captures a snapshot in about 5minutes, once an initial backup has been done, all because of the smart use of hard links. There is no special tweeking needed to get this speed. Just use Rsync, or a front-end the uses Rsync as its back-end. I use ext4 in Jessie. It just works. A quick read of Backintime web site leads me to believe that Backintime doesn't expose the full power of the file selection control that is available in Rsync. If you find yourself wishing to have some very special rules, it will probably be worth your while to do it directly in Rsync. For example, it is easy to backup selected portions of a Approx Debian package proxy. But Rsync is fast enough and makes compact enough backups that it is hardly worthwhile writing the selection rules. A few years ago, Rsync seemed to have a memory leak that caused it to crash on really if you tried to copy your backup disk for a second, off-site, copy. But not any more. Ext4 avoids the longgggg fsck of your backup drive. My system has recovered from computer crashes due to nearby lightening strikes, once the power is restored by the electric company. About your specific questions: the default selection of partition format parameters works just fine, With ext4 allowing 65000 hard links per inode, one can make a snapshot every hour, 24x7 for over 7 yrs (with ext3 you are limited to 'only' 3.5 yrs) As always, YMMV. -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150224055133.ga7...@big.lan.gnu
