Re: [rdiff-backup-users] windows profiles and refreshed files

[Ben Escoto]

>>>>> "Patrick J. Walsh" <address@hidden>
>>>>> wrote the following on Sun, 02 May 2004 15:48:55 -0400
>     We use roaming profiles for our windows users so that they can log in
> from different machines and see their familiar list of recent files, desktop
> settings, etc.  Every time a user logs on, their profile is copied to the
> local machine.  When they log off, it gets copied back.  Typically, very
> little has changed.  But of course the time stamps are updated.
> 
>     My question is this: would there be any benefit to using the
> --no-compare-inode option?  Would this decrease the number and size of files
> generated?  Is there any penalty such as a speed decrease when using this
> option?
> 
>     Or -- is there a way to tell rdiff to ignore changed file times if the
> file is unchanged? 
> 
>     And finally -- does backing up a dir structure that has updated
> modification times unnecessarily tax the server?  Should I then maybe
> exclude these directories during the hourly updates and just back them up
> once a day?

The --no-compare-inode option doesn't do what you hoped.  There's no
option option to tell rdiff-backup to ignore files with changed times
if they are unchanged:  rdiff-backup can only tell whether a file
with a changed time is changed by reading the file.

If a file's data doesn't change, the diffs produced will be very
small, and not take up much bandwidth.  But reading the files and
producing/checking their signatures will take extra time.


-- 
Ben Escoto

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