Re: suggestion: do not keep files in tar archives.

It strikes me that if what you want is an uncompressed mirror of your
disk, there are other programs around which should do that for you.  If
you want to achieve the effect of 
    tar <options for sender> | ssh server '(cd BackUpDir; tar xpf - )'
it is generally more efficient to use rsync rather than tar, and I know
that there are several scripts people have written to run rsync nightly
to update a mirror.  You can choose what you want to do with files that
have been deleted on the main disk -- make in-place backups, have
snapshot directories of previous days, etc.  Try searching for 'rsync
backup' on freshmeat.net and you'll get a list of several programs of
this sort,I believe.

If the goal is rather to replace tar archives with afio archives, then
it may be appropriate to patch that into hdup -- but I hope tar will
remain an option, since afio is not standard on many platforms (and the
version that can handle large files appears to still be listed as beta).

Bng


On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 02:23, Jesper K. Pedersen wrote:
> blackie-1tkZHNPFh85/[email protected] (Jesper K. Pedersen) writes:
> 
> | Hi.
> | 
> | Yesterday I needed to restore a file from my hdup for the first time, and
> | that thought me something new, namely that things can only go too slow when
> | restoring.
> | 
> | Unfortunately it went way to slow for my - at the moment - temper.
> | That made me start doing a bit of math.
> | 
> | I back up all of my hard disk, which includes all my digital photos etc, so
> | the total backup is approx 32Gb for the base backup.
> | 
> | I do the backup on a IDE disk connected though a USB wrapper device, which
> | is not utterly fast, but I don't really care, the priority is that I can
> | easily detach it from the rest of the system. I measured that the device
> | could copy in the order of magnitude 1Mb of data per sec.
> | 
> | Thus to simply read though the base file, I need to wait for 32.000 sec = 9
> | hours. And I do need that, as I understand tar.
> | 
> | 9 hours is a looooong time when you accidently deleted a very important
> | file from say your web server.
> | 
> | My suggestion is to unpack the files on the disk when copying over,
> | something along those lines:
> | 
> | tar <options for sender> | ssh server '(cd BackUpDir; tar xpf - )'
> | 
> | This would store all the files on the disk, and I could thus access them
> | very fast (within secs), as I would have random access to them.
> | 
> | Hope you like the idea and soon find time for implementing it.
> | 
> | Cheers
> | Jesper.
> I just discussed the issue with some of my coworkers, and they suggested
> that afio is capable of doing random access in the files. Thus replacing
> tar with afio in hdup might be even simpler than the above suggestion.
> 
> Cheers
> Jesper