[Nottingham] Depth first or breadth first for faster backups?

Dale Einarson Dale.Einarson at nottingham.ac.uk
Sat May 5 01:32:28 BST 2007


Heyla, ( 5th try to get an email to the list )
-- I'm new to the group,  this is my first post ( hello everyone )

Phil Lakin wrote:
> I highly recommend amanda (www.amanda.org) for tape backups, also works
> quite well to disk. Ideal if you have a lot of partitions / disks /
> servers to backup. We use it to backup and restore over 10TB with no
> trouble.
>
    Rsync is great for many things but if you want an archive with an
history,  I second the amanda suggestion.  It can be a bit finicky at
first but once it gets going...

    I have found a spanning tapes deficit;  If the directory you wish to
back up is larger then the tape size ( or the dumper directory ) it will
fail.  You need to break your source directories in the chunks that are
smaller then the tapes ( or dumper directories ) you backup to.

   In the past I had used amanda to make nightly backups of my files to a
temp disk.  very fast and useful for a quick restore of the important
working files!

  I could provide you with my conf if this might help.


> On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 13:26 +0100, Martin wrote:
>
>> OK Folks,
>>
>> A question for tonight:
>>
>> For traversing through directories and files, what should be the 
>> faster:
>>
>> Walking through the directories and files going depth first or breadth
>> first?
>>
>> I would guess that just doing a simple "dd" would be quickest and
>> minimise HDD head movements... But then that's only useful if you're
>> near 100% utilisation and you're going to mount the dd copy as an 
>> image!

The height and depth and breath my search can reach? (EBB)
    gnufind is depth first, I assume that would be the fastest way.
Certainly the FS does play a part of the data storage...  However, if
the FS is stagnant the slocate should do the job as reading on file is
faster then traversing directories


Cheers!
dale

PS:
   There seems to be some hangup with mail between machproductions and
lug.org.uk... lug.org.uk is not getting my machprod email, but I have
just found that it is not sending to machprod either :(
   Thanks to Martin for his help.


>> On a related theme:
>>
>> What utilities do people use for their backups?
>>
>>
>> See ya later,
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>>
>>



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