Backing up Outlook pst files

Matt McCutchen matt at mattmccutchen.net
Wed Dec 17 19:18:58 GMT 2008


On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 11:37 -0600, Ryan Malayter wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:46 AM, MW <rsync at urmel.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > Anyway, I will try the --inplace option but cold
> > you explain what you mean by "VSS snapshots" please?
> 
> Many modern operating systems have a "snapshot" function, which allows
> you to save a point-in-time copy of the state of a file system for in
> a space-efficient way. On Windows, this is called "Volume ShadowCopy
> Service" or VSS. On Mac OSX, this is called "Time Machine", and on
> Linux it can be a number of things but is usually done at the "LVM"
> layer.
> 
> So, if you use rsync to send your PST files to your Mac using
> --inplace, you can set up Time Machine to retain snapshots of the
> destination filesystem on the mac. So only changed blocks should be
> stored between versions of your PST file, with unchanged data being
> "shared" between the live copy and the snapshots.

Time Machine is a file-level hard-linked backup tool like rsnapshot, not
a block-level snapshot facility like VSS or LVM:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

I don't know if Mac OS X has block-level snapshots.  Another option
would be rdiff-backup ( http://nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ ), which is
similar in concept to rsnapshot but stores the latest snapshot and
backward deltas.

-- 
Matt



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