[PLUG] Rsync for backup - logrotate again ...

[Keith Lofstrom]

Kyle Hayes <kyle at silverbeach.net>:
> Rsync is fine if you have a lot of files that are in one of the two categories> below:
> 1) they are small,
> 2) they are not renamed.
                                                                                Felix Lee <felix.1 at canids.net>
> efficient renames could probably be added to rsync.  just a
> matter of picking a reasonable efficiency tradeoff.  (this is
> something I've been thinking about because it's annoying when
> renaming a directory causes rsync to retransmit every file under
> that directory.)

About a week back, I posted a request for help evaluating the Suse
mods to Redhat logrotate.  logrotate with the "dateext" enhancements
eliminates a lot of renaming.  When you think about it, if you are
backing up logfiles at all, you want to be able to find them by
date anyway, not by some meaningless numeric suffix. 

Another way to eliminate excess storage is to use Maildir rather than
Mbox format for mail.  This eliminates much of the "incrementing big
file" problem.  

One remaining P.I.T.A. is the .db files made by my current bogofilter  
setup.  When I save a mail file, or chuck it into the spam bin, I 
run it through bogofilter training.  Both the bogofilter .db files
get updated.  As they are running towards 90MB now, this means another
full copy gets saved at every backup.  Unless I come up with a better
way to do it, I will probably just turn off the training for a while.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs