Koozali.org: home of the SME Server
Obsolete Releases => SME 7.x Contribs => Topic started by: Marco Hess on November 01, 2009, 04:24:32 AM
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My current production server is setup to use the ShadowCopy feature
http://wiki.contribs.org/ShadowCopy as well as contains Affa backups of a number
of other (remote) systems, so hard links are in use extensively on this file system.
I like to move this system to some new hardware and was reading up on the Affa rise
feature and have setup the new server to start copying the old server. However after some significant time of copying I checked on the progress, I found that none of the ibays or user directories had been copied and roughly only the /home/e-smith/files/.shadow tree had been copied. The new server was now holding some 800G worth of data while the production server only held some 450G total.
So it appears that Affa (while very clever using hardlinks in the backup) may not be preserving the hard links from the source data that it is copying from?
From the rsync manpages I found that there is a --hard-links or -H option that makes rsync doing some work in preserving source data hard links (no experience). I checked through the /sbin/e-smith/affa script and found no evidence that this option is used anywhere.
I also tried to use the freedup facility as suggested in http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_with_Affa_and_FreeDup to re-apply hardlinks on the copied files, but I have a process running for days now and it has not completed (I think it trying to process some 4 million files). And from what I understand from freedup's documentation it won't apply the linking until right at the end when everything is processed first.
Running freedup on the production server on the /home/e-smith/files/.shadow tree (currently some 200G) in an attempt to possibly reduce that further, does not complete either because the process runs out of memory on that hardware :-( (and no option to extend that).
So I was just wondering what peoples experiences were in these situations. What is the best way to move to a new server that preserves the hard link existing on a production server.
Could/should the --hard-links option be set in the rsync commands in Affa?
Anybody has experience with the --hard-links option in rsync?
Marco