Re: Need help speeding up a backup

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Author: Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
CC: Matt Graham
Subject: Re: Need help speeding up a backup
On 2022-07-15 08:40, Mark Phillips via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> I am trying to back up the contents of the drives (ie /) to an
> external usb drive using rsync. It is taking a really long time.
> After 26 hours of continuous operation I have only transferred
> 138 GB out of 2+ TB


1G takes about 11.3 minutes? That's super slow. 1G takes about 30
seconds on a USB2 external disk here. How is this mounted?
 
> rsync  --no-compress --info=progress2 -avAXEWSlHh --exclude=
> {'/run','/mnt','/swapfile','/boot','/dev','/proc','/sys',
> '/run','/mnt','/media','/lost+found','/swapfile.extended','/tmp'}
> / '/media/mark/Seagate Portable Drive/tsunami-backups-Jul_13_17-39/'
> Any suggestions on how I can speed this up and not lose any data?


You don't need -AX unless you're using ACLs and xattrs, and you
probably aren't. You probably don't want -W. -H is IIRC heavyweight
and you probably don't have many (or any) hard links on your
filesystems. The path to the backup disk looks like an automounter is
involved, that can cause dumb things like being mounted with sync.

First suggestion, just use -av . Second suggestion, instead of trying
to back up everything, back up only the irreplaceable stuff. This is
usually /home and /etc , maybe /usr/local . When rsyncing a lot of
stuff (800G not 2T though), a significant amount of time gets spent
stat()ing every single file and dir on both source and destination. How
many files are you dealing with? /home here has 272G and 711889 inodes
according to df -i. An initial sync would take roughly 136 minutes,
subsequent syncs would take roughly 4 minutes. That's what I recall
from the last time I used rsync to backup.

While it's written in Golang and therefore suspect, restic (
https://restic.github.io/ ) has an interesting feature that allows you
to retain a varying number of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly
snapshots of whatever it is you want to back up. The documentation
about how to get to a specific restore point is not great, and the
"mount restore point" functionality horks up directory permissions.
However, it's quite fast at backing up stuff, and it can use S3 buckets
and some other not-your-computer networky things instead of local disks
as backup destinations.

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