• This software is owned by The university of California, Irvine, and is not distributed under any version of the GPL. GPL is a fine series of licenses, but the owners of the software need it to be distributed under these terms.
    drsbackup is for backing up systems, disk to disk. It is not aimed at your cron job that does periodic backups. Instead, it is intended as a one-shot backup facility, for use when you, say, need to upgrade a system, in which case doing a -a followed by a -a -i can be very effective.

    It has three primary modes of operation:

    1. Back up all filesystems on the system, as determined by a df-local script that lists all local filesystems. If your df-local script doesn't work, don't blame drsbackup .
    2. Back up all filesystems specified with -f.
    3. Back up all files that have changed since initial install (requires stamp/check-stamp/elim-dirs, and a stamp snapshot to have been done at install time).
    Largely orthogonal to the above modes of operation, there are these additional, independent modes of operation:
    1. Copy all files, but split out
    2. Copy only files that have changed (presumes split out copies)
    3. Copy all files, but to a series of tar archives
    You can also specify whether transfers should be compressed or not (only on the client side, so far, which is usually what one wants, but not always).

    Run it with an argument of -h for usage.

    Download here.

    Future improvements:

    1. Currently, when reblock uses du to estimate the size of the data transfer, it applies a scaling factor to the du result in an attempt to make the du result more "real world". This scaling factor was determined on a Solaris 8 10/01 system, backing up mostly just the operating system. Other OSes, and various collections of user data, would likely be better off with other scaling factors. Toward this end, it might be a good idea to allow the user to specify what scaling factor they want to use.
    2. Currently, drsbackup is intended to always copy files and preserve uid's and gid's numerically, instead of by name. Both rsync and GNU tar appear to preserve uid's and gid's by name by default. Someday, there probably should be an option to control this behavior.
    3. In addition to the "backup up everything that has changed according to stamp" mode, there probably should be similar modes that:
      1. Backup all files that have changed, according to tripwire
      2. Backup all files that have changed since the install time, as heuristically determined by looking at some key ctimes and/or mtimes in system directories that shouldn't change much.

    Bugs:

    1. 2005-12-15: The command drsbackup -s -a -d username@hostname:~username/backups/gram.eng/ did do a split up copy, but -s is supposed to request a series of tar archives. Attempted a fix later the same day, but did not test it!

    For more than you ever really wanted to know about large data transfers, please see Copy lots of data. You're probably better off just using drsbackup in most cases though.

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    Timestamp: 2024-12-27 08:46:16 PST

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