Re: [gentoo-user] Backup program that compresses data but only changes new files.

[J. Roeleveld]

On Monday, August 15, 2022 12:44:11 AM CEST Dale wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> With my new fiber internet, my poor disks are getting a work out, and
> also filling up.  First casualty, my backup disk.  I have one directory
> that is . . . well . . . huge.  It's about 7TBs or so.  This is where it
> is right now and it's still trying to pack in files.
>
> /dev/mapper/8tb            7.3T  7.1T  201G  98% /mnt/8tb

<snipped>

> Thoughts?  Ideas?

Plenty, see below:

For backups to external disks, I would recommend having a look at "dar" : 
$ eix -e dar
* app-backup/dar
     Available versions:  2.7.6^t ~2.7.7^t {argon2 curl dar32 dar64 doc gcrypt 
gpg lz4 lzo nls rsync threads xattr}
     Homepage:            http://dar.linux.free.fr/
     Description:         A full featured backup tool, aimed for disks

It's been around for a while and the developer is active and responds quite 
well to questions.
It supports compression (different compression methods), incremental backups 
(only need a catalogue of the previous backup for the incremental) and 
encryption.

The NAS options others mentioned would also work as they can compress data on 
disk and you'd only notice a delay in writing/reading (depending on the 
compression method used). I would recommend using one that uses ZFS on-disk as 
it's more reliable and robust then BTRFS.

One option that comes available for you now that you are no longer limited to 
slow ADSL: Cloud backups.

I use Backblaze (B2) to store compressed backups that haven't been stored on 
tape to off-site locations.

But, you can also encrypt the backups locally and store the 
encrypted+compressed backupfiles on other cloud storage.

--
Joost