Hi, This seems to be a reappearing request. Interestingly enough, I wanted the exact same thing a while ago and nobody was able to suggest a quick solution without implementing a new feature. I didn't have the time to read into the rsync source code, so I decided to write a little perl script, which works similar to rsnapshot. It - keeps one exact copy of the source which is updated every time - stores the changes between the current and the last run in an extra directory which is labelled interval_date_time - supports different intervals by merging several more frequent ones into one less frequent (7 daily -> 1 weekly) - does not use hard links
At the moment, I run it about 5 times a day on a 3TB file system (1.2M files) with about 400MB changes each time and it takes around half an hour. I haven't put an amazing amount of work into it because it was never supposed to be used by anyone else than myself; it's not foolproof but I am willing to share it around and improve it if there is interest. Cheers, Tom Josh Hanson wrote: > David, > > You make some good points. However, I still think a --move-dest > feature would be handy. > > First of all, --link-dest is nice on platforms and file systems that > support hard links, but not all platforms and file systems do, and > some that do have tagged them on as an afterthought but don't support > them very well, or very efficiently. > > Second, even on systems that do support it, for frequent backups of > large numbers of files which may change only rarely, the size of all > the hard links may not be negligible. > > Finally, it's always nice, given the option, to avoid hard links and > keep a one-to-one relationship between the "files" I see (i.e. the > links) and the actual allocated regions on the disk. Hard links make > it impossible to know just how much space each backup takes up. If my > backup disk is filling up, I'd like to be able to see which files are > taking the most space; I might decide to manually delete older copies > of large files, and I won't want to go through and delete every > single link to the file. > > -- Josh > > > > -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Overton Sent: > Monday, December 08, 2008 5:35 PM To: Josh Hanson Cc: > rsync@lists.samba.org Subject: Re: Feature I'd love to see: > --move-dest > > Hi, > > I'm curious as to why you need a new option rather than just using > --link-dest. Both --link-dest and --copy-dest already allow the "two > very common restor scenarios" that you mention and --link-dest uses > hardly any extra disk space than your --move-dest suggestion. You > also get the added advantage that each previous backup continues to > look like a full "snapshot". > > David > > 2008/12/9 Josh Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> Looking over rsync's --compare-dest, --copy-dest, and --link-dest >> options, there's one thing I really wish I could do, and I've been >> looking for a few years now for a program that could do it: Instead >> of copying or hard-linking from the compare directory to the target >> directory, I'd like to move the files. >> >> That is, whenever the file already exists in the compare directory, >> it is moved forward into the target directory; but if the existing >> file is different or doesn't exist, then a new file is made in the >> target directory. >> >> The result would be that, after several backups (each to a new >> directory, perhaps named with the current date) the most recent >> directory would be a snapshot of the source, and each previous >> directory would have previous versions of files or copies of >> deleted files. (This is effectively the opposite result of >> --compare-dest, which gives you a snapshot of the first version of >> the files, with each successive directory storing only the changed >> files.) This makes two very common restore scenarios very simple: >> restoring the entire directory tree to the most recent version >> after a drive failure, and restoring a previous version of a single >> file after it was accidentally over-written, even if the modified >> version has since been backed up. >> >> I looked over the rsync source to see if I could add this >> functionality myself, but I'm really not a very good programmer and >> it's definitely beyond me. To someone familiar with the source, >> however, I have to imagine it would be a fairly straightforward >> feature to add... just add replace the copy operation in >> --copy-dest or the link operation in --link-dest with a move >> operation. >> >> -- Josh -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting >> the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: >> https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, >> read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html >> -- Thomas Gutzler Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory The University of Western Australia http://obel.ee.uwa.edu.au/ phone: +61 8 6488 3916 -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
