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Sat, 17 Jan 2009

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/Admin/backups/misc: The Problem with a Hardlink Backup Strategy

Most of the Open Source backup software that I am aware of that does incremental backups (including backuppc, which I use) re-creates the entire directory structure for each increment. Copies of files with mulitple identical copies are then hard-linked together so that there is only one copy on disk, with obvious savings in disk usage.

This post[1] points out that as the amount of stuff being backed up increases, an fsck on the partition in question can start taking a *very* long time, perhaps even running out of memory.

I have not even noticed, because I did not place my backuppc archive on the root partition. And it is only the root partition that occasionally experiences an automatic fsck on boot. Generally speaking, for better or worse, I simply never fsck non-root partitions without good reason, and Linux seems to give me very little of such "good reason". I am inclined to say this seems to be more of a hypothetical then a real problem, and until I actually see evidence of breakage I am not going to worry about it.

[1] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ThoughtsByTed/~3/510209390/

posted at: 13:19 | path: /Admin/backups/misc | permanent link to this entry