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To: "Noah" <admin2@enabled.com>
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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: 24 Mar 2006 09:24:49 -0500
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Backup Up On Unreliable Link
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"Noah" <admin2@enabled.com> writes:

> Hi there,
> 
> No response so far on the rdiff-backup mail list.
> 
> Does anybody have experience and/or recommendations and/or scripts that could
> help somebody who usning rdiff-backup up across an unreliable link?  If
> rdiff-backup fails in the middle of a backup it regresses to the last backup
> that finished successfully.  If you are running this across an unreliable link
> you could consistently have a partial backup. 
> 
> I would like to know if there are systems to solving this situation.
> 
> Hope to get some input from other users.

It depends on exactly what form of unreliability you are dealing with
on the connection.  One simple strategy you might try is to break the
backup into smaller pieces (and run them sequentially).  That still
leaves you with partial backups in case of a failure, but you get
better checkpointing capability.