Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I have one more question:
Is --fsck enough of an verification that my backup data is in a consistent, uncorrupted, no-error, restorable state? Is it reasonable to periodically run fsck to do some checking? A problem with many backup schemes is that one doesn't know whether their backup is good until they really need it. S3 disk seems nigh infallible, but perhaps some other parts of the backup system can fail.
> I am unable to get include/exclude to work the way I want. The problem
> is that exclude always take precedence over include, and I cannot
> include only a few entries in a directory.
Yep. Tarsnap --include and --exclude are deliberately compatible with
the identical tar options, and those act like shell globs rather than
regular expressions... some things just plain aren't possible with them.
I think the right solution here is to add some new --include-regex and
--exclude-regex options, but I haven't had time to do this yet.
It is quite a common case that one would like to selectively include
some directories in one archive, I suggest you may put this
include/exclude behavior at a higher priority considering that it
doesn't take too much effort to implement.
> I've another question: Does deduplication work on an account-wide way?
> ie. if I move a big file from one directory to another, the 2
> directories being in different tarsnap archives, would the file block
> duplication be recognized?
Yes. By the time bits get to the deduplication code, Tarsnap has pretty
much forgotten where they came from. You'll see a slight performance penalty
on the first backup you do after moving the file because Tarsnap will need to
re-read it rather than relying on a cached copy, but after reading its way
through the file Tarsnap will figure out that it doesn't need to upload any
of it again.