[Linux-disciples] A backup daemon?

[Adam Rosi-Kessel]

Seems like it's usually more efficient to do a bulk task like this all
at once than have something constantly running.  You can schedule
rdiff-backup for off peak hours (BCN's runs at 2am) when people aren't
much using the CPU or disk.

Usually, speedy backups aren't much of a priority.  You might be able to
front-load/distribute some of the processing so the backup itself took
less time (although with the nightly BCN backup > 95% of the time spent
is bandwidth transferring files) but I'm not sure why people would care.

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> I'm running rdiff-backup now, and it occurs to me: programs
> like inotify are kernel-level hooks for monitoring changed
> files; why couldn't we use these to speed up backups? Then,
> instead of running rdiff-backup once every so often, and
> having it go through a processor-intensive check of every
> file on my disk, it could sit in the background and
> constantly monitor which files are changing. It wouldn't
> monitor places like /tmp or ~/tmp or /proc or /sys, but
> could monitor whatever I tell it to monitor. When a file
> changes, it might do something processor-intensive like
> compute a hash of the newly-changed file, or it might do
> something less processor-intensive like saving the
> last-changed date on the file. Then when it came time to
> upload all the changed files, it could check all the files
> that have been marked changed, compute rdiffs on them, and
> upload those.
> 
> Does this seem like a sensible approach? Would running
> inotify on all those thousands of files all the time end up
> being a computational drag, in that it would markedly slow
> down the user experience? It seems like it could be a useful
> tool to have around, if nothing else.
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