[ale] archiving backups

[Scott Plante]

This is an instance where hard links are probably called for--no need to create a dupes directory. Each hard link is equal, and the file only goes away when the last link is deleted. 


There is a command 'fdupes' that's available in the standard yum/zypper repos (and probably others) that will automatically find duplicate files and, with --link option, create hard or soft links automatically. 

Scott 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Chris Fowler" <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> 
To: "ALE" <ale at ale.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 9:09:16 AM 
Subject: [ale] archiving backups 

This is not the first time I've attempted backing up everything I've 
created over 20 years. 

Every so often someone I do not know emails me for a file, software, etc 
that I may have based on what they read on a mailing list archive. Last 
night someone requested a file from a project I was working on back in 
2002. 

Looking for this file I am reminded about how much crap I really have. 
I have floppies, CDs, DVDs, etc of backups, data, and whatever. Many of 
these have dupes. I want to copy all this stuff to a hard drive then 
archive it. I need to deal with these duplicates. 

A year ago I wrote a perl program to locate the duplicates using md5 
hashes. I was then going to delete all, but one of the dupes. The 
problem I ran into is that some of these could be installs of software 
and I needed to keep the dupe. I was then wasting time manually 
determining which ones to delete and which ones to keep. 

Last night I had an idea that may work. Create a directory of the root 
of the backup named 'dupes'. Copy the dupe once into that directory. 
Every where else replace the dupe with a symbolic link. 

My biggest issue with backups is management of the data. At 40 I'll 
copy something today and 6 months from now forget why I even did that. 
It could be a 1GB SVN software tree I checked out, made some changes for 
testing and then decided not to delete it. Now I have 1GB of stuff I 
feel like I can not delete. I can't even remember why I made the copy. 
Ugh. 

I have so many CDs and DVDs stacked in my office it would be nice to get 
rid of them. I have drives in boxes that I've forgotten what is on 
them. I'm a tech hoarder. 

Chris 
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