Re: Discussion about file format for the future

[Dominic Raferd]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 15:28, Derek Atkins <derek@ihtfp.com> wrote:
>
> EricZolf <ewl+rdiffbackup@lavar.de> writes:
>
> > 3. to answer Derek's e-mail as well: would it have an impact on speed?
> > To be honest, no clue, we would need to analyze this.
>
> Just as another data point, apparently a year ago my backup server
> wasn't backing stuff up, so for the past few days my nightly backup
> hasn't had anything to do for the "remove incremental > 1 year old" step
> it does.  You know what?  Instead of the process finishing at 6-8pm it's
> finishing before 8am!
>
> In other words, it takes 7 hours to backup all my systems, and then
> 10-12 hours more to remove all the year-old incrementals.  Yes, the
> removal of snapshots is taking longer than the backups themselves.
>
> Based on this, if I had unlimited disk space I would never remove an
> incremental.  But disk space is not unlimited, and I figured 1 year was a
> good cutoff.
>
> I wish this were faster.  My worst offender is one particular system: 3
> hours to backup the server and 8 hours to remove an incremental from that
> dataset.  That seems.... unbalanced.

I never use --remove-older-than so I never hit this problem. Did you
try it with --force as well? I don't see why it should be so slow, in
a system based on reverse-diffs removal of the oldest data should be
relatively straightforward.