[clug] Deduping backups from more than one workstation?

Nathan Rickerby rickerby at gmail.com
Sun Nov 13 03:43:30 MST 2011


On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 05:08:14PM +1100, Michael Still wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I have a backup scheme which involves my workstations rsyncing
> themselves to a server. At the moment there is one directory per
> workstation. However, this is kind of painful because the workstations
> have many duplicate files (source repositories, OS files, etc).
>
> So, how do other people solve this problem? Is there some fancy pants
> filesystem which can handle having duplicates of many files while only
> storing them once?

I use fdupes[1], the Debian package includes a patch[2] which adds
an option to hard link any duplicate files found. One disadvantage
is that it doesn't provide the block or sub-file deduplication that
a fancy pants file system might.

1. http://premium.caribe.net/~adrian2/fdupes.html
2. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=284274


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