Memory consumption for rsync -axv --delete

[John Long]

Hi,

I have been using rsync for many years and never had any kind of problem.
Lately I am running out of RAM trying to do an incremental backup to a box
that only has 2G of RAM. The entire directory structure I'm mirroring is
about 200G of files. A minority of subdirectories have many files.

Is there a way to do an incremental backup with --delete option that does
not use as much memory? Is there a way to tell rsync to use a tempfile
instead of RAM for keeping tracking of whatever it does?

And would it be useful to add ignores for the subdirectories I know have
many files and back them up separately? Is --delete safe to use in this
case, as in does --delete with --ignore somedir/ not delete files in other
target dirs that are not in the ignore path?

Thanks,

/jl

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