On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 09:32:02AM -0400, Celejar wrote: > Interesting, thanks. I've been using rsnapshot for years, and am > basically satisfied with it, although the performance when run on my > T61 laptop (backing up to a (slow) USB external disk) is indeed painful > (I do have largeish Maildirs). [Interestingly, when run on my ARM > (Kirkland) NAS, pulling from the laptop over ethernet / wifi, > performance seems much better ...] The first machine where I really had performance problems with rsnapshot was an ARM-powered Thecus N2100, but that was a pretty weak CPU from what I recall. > One thing I really like about rsnapshot is how the backups are all > stored just as the files themselves, without any special formats, and > can therefore be inspected / restored from using just the ordinary > filesystem tools. That is a nice property, yes. the rdiff-backup format is not quite this, but is well specified outside of the code (from the last time I looked) to give me confidence I could pull my files out by hand if I needed to. I'm not sure if I mentioned it in this thread or not, but I actually began a third party tool to parse rdiff-backup format backups[1], and there exists another third party tool to do the same thing[2]. > A number of years ago I looked at rdiff-backup, but dropped it due to > suspicions of the code quality: the project seemed to be dead, and even > significant bugs were being ignored: > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=623336 > https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/10/msg00182.html > > I see that you, too, have a report that's been ignored for more than 5 > years ;) Yes, that's true. The bug that I remember reporting (haven't looked it back up to be sure) was that reverting a partial (failed) backup requires some disk space and so fails if the backup device is full - this is a big problem in theory, but in practice I'm running my backup jobs as non-root, so there's always the 5% or so reserved space for root users. So in this situation I can have the roll-back occur as root. > Am I being unreasonable? You are certainly more of an expert than I - I > suppose you find that it is quality software, and better than > rsnapshot, despite basically being dead? Lack of bug and development activity is certainly a worrying sign of a program with problems. But development activity naturally dies off if a program does what it is supposed to do, so it's not always a certainty that it is doomed. It remains a concern for me, but regardless the tool has worked very well. [1] https://jmtd.net/software/rdifffs/ [2] https://github.com/rbrito/rdiff-backup-fs -- Jonathan Dowland Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature