Verifying backups

Ronald F. Guilmette
Thu, 01 Oct 2015 18:29:45 -0000

In message <560cca51.5cWVPTQcE1NFlU+U%perryh at pluto.rain.com>,
perryh at pluto.rain.com (Perry Hutchison) wrote:

>Just because rsync is an awesome hammer, it does not necessarily follow
>that every problem involving backups closely resembles a nail :)

An excellent and very apropos point.

>Since your source and backup are both local, I suspect using rsync as
>a comparison tool is overkill.  (It may even be overkill for making
>the backups in the first place.)

In theory, I might be able to use cpio -p rather than rsync to make my
backups, however for some reason that I can't remember anymore, when
I originally set up my system for making backups, I looked at that
possibility and concluded that rsync was preferable to cpio -p.  I
wish that I could remember why.  (It might have had to do with better
or more complete handling of ``weird stuff'' like extended file
attributes, ACLs, device nodes, or other such oddities)

>Had you considered "diff -q -r"?

No, actually.  thanks for the suggestion!

>(I'm using gnu diff; other variants might have different command
options.)

The diff I have here on FreeBSD (9.1) seem to be GNU, so this will work.


Regards,
rfg