From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jan 2 14:30:17 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EF94316A4CE for ; Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:30:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from smtpout.mac.com (smtpout.mac.com [17.250.248.46]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 324BC43D31 for ; Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:30:15 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from paulbeard@mac.com) Received: from mac.com (smtpin08-en2 [10.13.10.153]) by smtpout.mac.com (8.12.6/MantshX 2.0) with ESMTP id i02MUEJR011195; Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:30:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from [192.168.2.8] (12-228-114-247.client.attbi.com [12.228.114.247]) (authenticated bits=0)i02MUE8v018568; Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:30:14 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <20040102172714.507A371B6@sierra.rtfm.com> References: <20040102172714.507A371B6@sierra.rtfm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v609) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: <39F490BE-3D73-11D8-8FEF-000A95BBCCF8@mac.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: paul beard Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:30:11 -0800 To: Eric Rescorla X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.609) cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Plan 9 style backup utility for FreeBSD? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 22:30:18 -0000 On Jan 2, 2004, at 9:26 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote: > I'm finally getting to the point where my disk capacity massively > outruns my tape capacity, so I'm thinking of converting to removable > disk-only backup. I could just use Amanda to backup to disk, but I'm > intrigued by Plan 9's archival filesystem where backups from (say Jan > 1, > 1999) would go in /1999/1/1 and you could just find the files directly > rather than grovelling through dump files. > > Is there some standard tool for doing this on FreeBSD? You can't just > do a direct copy cause this results in major disk space wastage so I'm > imagining you need to use hard links or something to keep the size > down. > I followed this on your weblog and I may be missing something: I keep coming back to some cocktail of find(1), ctime(3), diff(1) and friends (pax, tar) to locate and mirror only changed files in a duplicated hierarchy. If I'm understanding it, in 1999/1/1 you might have a file tree that looks like the "live" one with only files that were modified on 1999/1/1, but all other files would be links back to their unchanged versions. I like the idea of it. -- Paul Beard paulbeard [at] mac.com