Re: Tarsnap and hard disk swap

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 02/23/16 08:10, John Gamble wrote:
> I am going to replace my computer's hard disk with a new one and was wondering
> what I need to do in order to allow Tarsnap backups to continue as before. 
> Can anyone advise on this please?
> 
> Here are some specific questions:
> 
> 1).  Once the new hard disk is installed, do I need to completely re-install
> Tarsnap from scratch, or can I simply copy across some files to the new hard disk?

Install the tarsnap software again.  After that, it depends if you want to
continue adding archives to the existing set you have, or start over with
a new archival space.

If you want to start over, then run tarsnap-keygen as if you've never created
any archives; that will give you a key file which you can use as before.  (And
then decide what to do with your old archives, whether you want to keep them
or delete them using the old key.)

If you want to continue adding archives to your existing set, copy the key
file(s) you were using and the tarsnap cache directory across.

> 2).  Instead of simply copying across some files to the new hard disk, as
> mentioned above, would it be better, from a backup point of view, to copy
> across my entire /home directory to the new disk, rather than individual
> files?  (I'm currently running Linux, with my /home directory located on a
> separate disk partition from the operating system.)

Tarsnap doesn't care.  The deduplication will recognize duplicate data even if
files move around.

> 3).  I'm replacing a conventional (i.e.spinning) hard disk with a solid-state
> one.  Does that affect Tarsnap at all?

Yes, tarsnap will be faster. ;-)

But no, it doesn't affect tarsnap aside from that.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid