[UFO Chicago] Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs

[Neil R. Ormos]

Jordan Bettis wrote:
> sten wrote:

>> This is interesting, and unfortunate if true,
>> but I'm backing up my Linode to my home PC on
>> Comcast every day. A full backup bzipped at the
>> Linode is about 700MB currently, and I pull
>> that down once a week. My daily diff backups
>> are 40-80MB bzipped.

> Interesting. I do a rsync once per night against
> a local copy of the file tree on my linode and
> it's only a few megabytes a day, almost always
> in spool and log files. I imagine it would be a
> lot bigger if I had large database files though.

> Why do you pull a full copy once a week? Rsync
> with the proper options will keep two trees
> synched indefinitely.

> If you're using backuppc or something so you can
> have a clicky interface or backversions of files
> you could probably safely save a lot of bandwith
> by rsyncing the tree onto your local system and
> then running the backup program against that
> tree to generate backversions.

There are some interesting incremental backup
strategies involving rsync and symlinks [1], but
they usually invert what is ordinarily expected in
terms of which backup is "complete" and which
backup is "incremental".  The latest backup is
"complete" and the prior backups are
"incremental".  This arrangement works fine if you
want to keep a complete copy of the original tree
online, but it is not conducive to saving
incremental backups to offline media such as tape,
DVD, CD-ROM.

--Neil

[1] <http://www.linux-backup.net/Full_Inc/>