Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Way to handle symlinks

[chuck odonnell]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 01:37:22PM -0500, Steve Dutky wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I need to backup a directory with multiple large files of the form
> snapshot/ foo-yymmddhhMMSS.log which are snapshots of foo.log.
> 
> Conceptually, what I would like to do is for each file
> 
> ln -s snapshot/foo-yymmddhhMMSS.log intermediate/foo.log
> 
> rdiff-backup intermediate  backup
> 
> Can anyone suggest a sane way of doing this?  I'm mounting snapshot
> across a network and I would like to avoid unnecessarily copying
> files.

Hello Steve,

I am trying to understand how "ln -s" will offer reduced bandwidth
utilization over something like:

 rsync -a snapshot/foo-yymmddhhMMSS.log intermediate/foo.log
 rdiff-backup intermediate backup

or

 cp snapshot/foo-yymmddhhMMSS.log intermediate/foo.log
 rdiff-backup intermediate backup

Either way the data has to cross the network, right?

Also, I can see using a single 'foo.log' to save having to figure out
what the latest log file if you restore, but not for saving disk
space. Assuming each daily log is new and different, rdiff-backup will
just save the whole file each day, just like it would if you copied
over a new file every day and kept them all on hand.

I assume I am just misunderstanding what you are trying to do.

Best,

Chuck