Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Limit creation of log and sesssion data

[Hans F. Nordhaug]

* Maarten Bezemer <address@hidden> [2005-12-16]:
> 
> On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Ben Escoto wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Hans F. Nordhaug" <address@hidden>
> > >>>>> wrote the following on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:47:15 +0100
> > >
> > > However, other (easier) approaches come to mind:
> > > 1) Never, ever gzip an empty file. All my error_log files have size
> > >    108 in stead of 0 zero because they are compressed.
> > > 2) Don't write any logs or session data if there are no changes.
> > >    (Make it an option or the default.) This would help a lot!
> > 
> > Yes, I think the error_log file could be skipped if there are no
> > errors.  Anyone see any drawbacks to this?
> 
> Which filesystems allocate disk space for an empty file? AFAIK, ext2 only
> uses an entry in the 'directory', but no blocks for contents. So, by just
> not gzipping an empty file, it will probably take less space already.

Which is exactly what I suggested. (I just complained about gzipping
an empty file.) However, a "million" empty files does clutter the
directory...
 
> A switch for not writing session_statistics files might be useful, but
> adding an 'rm rdiff-backup-data/session_statistics*' in the script calling
> rdiff-backup shouldn't be too hard either.

I agree, this is what I called post processing. But to repeat myself -
to be consistent it makes sense to also have a "--no-session-statistics"
option.

Hans

PS! Since you claim it's easy to add 'rm rdiff-backup-data/session_statistics*'
to my cron scripts, I would say it's easy to add an "if error_log
exists test" to your cron scripts :-)