Re: Delete archive time

[Chris Webb <chris@arachsys.com>]

Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> writes:

> Do you need faster performance for deleting *one* archive, or would it
> be sufficient to have faster performance for deleting *several archives
> at once*?

Hi Colin. You're right, one of the things that makes this particularly
painful in my case is the performance for deleting tens of archives at once.
At present, it seems to be roughly linear in the number of archives, so an
hour to delete an archive becomes tens of hours.

They are daily backups of shell account machines, so will be almost
completely identical.

I originally intended to have a privileged machine log in periodically to
clear out old archives, as I don't want to give the machine being backed-up
privileges to delete its own archives in case of compromise. However, the
problem with this is the --fsck thing, so in reality, I have a passphrased
key, log in to the machine being backed-up, trust my judgement about whether
it's been compromised (hmm!) and do the delete manually. I'm forgetful, so
that's pretty infrequent! I seem to have forgotten to clear out the daily
backups for a few months now...

Cheers,

Chris.