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Dear Colin, Sorry for any confusion in my replies. I wasn't referring to a 'common archive', as such, and should have perhaps written it as 'files in common'. Or maybe that's making things worse... Anyway, I think I've got it now - although I admit I remain hazy on exactly how it works - and am reassured that I can, in fact, carry out a full backup over several sessions. Thanks again for your patience and explanations. Regards, John ##
On 21-03-2014 21:11, Colin Percival wrote: On 03/21/14 08:13, John Gamble wrote:Thanks again for your reply. Still slightly confused about this process though…. In the scenario I'm thinking about, 'backup-wednesday.part' and 'backup-thursday' wouldn't have any common files (or blocks of data). The complete archive would be the sum of 'backup-wednesday.part' and 'backup-thursday'.What "common archive" are you talking about here? If you mean "the archive you're creating on Thursday", that's the 'backup-thursday' archive I was talking about, and any blocks from Wednesday which are needed will be included in that archive automatically.Therefore, how is it possible to delete 'backup-wednesday.part'? Is it, in fact, impossible to do so in this case? If so, is there any way to create a single complete backup/archive from two or more partial ones, that were formed by premature termination of a backup.You *can* merge two archives together, but I don't think that's what you want to do here. You can just tell tarsnap to create an archive with all of the data you want it to have, and it will magically pull in bits of previous archives as needed.I'm asking all this because given the speed of my upload connection, I know that I'll have to stop the initial backup before it completes. Just wanted to make sure that I'll ultimately be able to create a complete backup.Assuming that you don't have more "new" data each day than you have bandwidth, yes. Just tell Tarsnap to create a backup with all of your data each day, and then stop it when you need to. If you have 1 GB/day of bandwidth, you'll end up with a 1 GB archive on Monday, a 2 GB archive on Tuesday (of which 1 GB was uploaded new and 1 GB was reused from Monday), a 3 GB archive on Wednesday (of which 1 GB was uploaded new and 2 GB was reused), etc. until you finally have a single archive containing all of your data.1). To terminate an ongoing backup, is the command ^Q?Ctrl-Q into the terminal session where you're running tarsnap, or you can send a SIGQUIT signal (which is what Ctrl-Q translates into).2). While the backup is ongoing, is it OK to use the computer as normal?Of course. UNIX is designed for multitasking. ;-)
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