<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>To look at this slightly differently...</div><div><br></div><div>You say "simple backups". By that measure, the simplest backup is replication; I've run rsync against filesystems with 1000000+ files and it's an excellent solution. Covers you to some degree for things like hardware errors.</div><div><br></div><div>Backups tend to get un-simple when you have more requirements: like, something got modified last Tuesday. Your Thursday replication overwrote that file. That's not good.</div><div><br></div><div>There's a discussion in Linux Server Hacks (O'Reilly) of a "snapshot-like" backup that's pretty interesting. I've avoided Amanda, but implemented Bacula last year and it's a pretty good system but the overhead is significant if the simple(-er) solutions will work for you.</div><div><br></div><div>Tar, Pax, and Dump offer options to do incremental backups. Again, simpler, and workable if it's just a couple systems. If not: something giving you better control is going to pay you back.</div><div><br></div><div>Hope that helps!</div><div><br></div><div>_KMP</div><br><div><div>On 8 Jan 09, at 16:06 , Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "> <div>Hi Folks:</div><div><br></div><div>I'm looking at backups - simple backups right now.</div><div><br></div><div>We have a strategy where an old computer is mounted with a large external, removable hard drive. Directories - large directories - that we have on our other production servers are mounted on this small computer via NFS. A cron job then does a simple "cp" from the NFS mounted production drive partitions to to the large, external, removable hard drive.</div><div><br></div><div>I thought it was an elegant solution, myself, except for one small, niggling detail.</div><div><br></div><div>It doesn't work.</div><div><br></div><div>The process doesn't copy all the files. Oh, we're not having a problem with file locks, no. When you do a "du -sh <directory>" comparison between the /scsi/web directory on the backup drive and the production /scsi/web directory the differences measure in the GB. For example my production /scsi partition has 62GB on it. The most recently done backup has 42GB on it!</div><div><br></div><div>What our research found is that the cp command apparently has a limit of copying 250,000 inodes. I have image directories on the webserver that have 114,000 files so this is the limit I think I'm running into.</div><div><br></div><div>While I'm looking at solutions like Bacula and Amanda, etc., I'm wondering if RSYNCing the files may work. Or will I run into the same limitation?</div><div><br></div><div>Any thoughts?</div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>---</div><div>Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]</div><div>American Association of Variable Star Observers</div><div><rkinne @ aavso.org></div><div><br></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>bblisa mailing list<br><a href="mailto:bblisa@bblisa.org">bblisa@bblisa.org</a><br>http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa</blockquote></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Helvetica">--</font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Helvetica">K. M. Peterson <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>voice:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>+1 617 731 6177</font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Helvetica">Boston, Massachusetts, USA <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>fax:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>+1 413 638 6486</font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Helvetica"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Full contact information at <a href="http://kmpeterson.com/contact.html">http://kmpeterson.com/contact.html</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font></p> </div> </div><br></body></html>