Well, I decided to shrink my 3.7 tb partition filled with rsnapshot backs (tons of hardlinks) down to 1.2 tb. Phase 2 of resizing took about 12 hours, which is acceptable, but phase 4 (updating the inode references) has been running for nearly 2 days, and is still nowhere near complete. Thought this wouldn’t take all that long since most of the end of the partition is completely empty. Can I end this early?
There are some folders that need to be deleted, (delete operations don’t complete if you shutdown early) which if deleted would most likely substantially speed the process up.
Well, I’m moving it to a new disk, and decided to shrink the partition so it would fit into the partition I was going to dd it into. (As far as I’m aware you can’t dd to directly after a partition. Maybe you can set up an offset, but if I get the math wrong I’m blowing away the first partition on the other disk) Might end up remounting it once I finish shrinking it, and cleaning up some leftover cruft, and maybe consider shrinking it again; but, that might not be happening.
There’s probably 2 or 3 years of hardlinks in the partition.
If I was to make the partition larger resize2fs wouldn’t take nearly as long, and on one of their mailing lists I noticed the shrinking process isn’t optimized since rarely does anyone shrink a partition.
I’ve moved to Borg over rsnapshot. (rsnapshot isn’t being maintained) But, I’m keeping the rsnapshot partition around incase Borg isn’t backing up correctly.
Basically, I have 2 external drives connected to the computer for back ups and media, and I’m reducing it down to 1 drive so I can boot a bit faster.
You can DD from one partition to another, but yes, if the partition sizes don’t match, you can run into problems.
That’s why I hate rsnapshot. I’ve been working on designing a better solution, but progress is slow because I’ve been so busy over the last few months.
They’re awesome for incremental backups. Saves a ton of time when you’re backing up the system once an hour.
In the long run, I’m probably going to switch to using borg just for backing up everything, but most of home, and use rsnapshot for the home partition. It’s just convenient for being able to quickly roll back to an old version of a file.
Can’t wait for large external SSDs being affordable.
Yeah, that’s going to be a long way out. That said, if you want cheap rust, those EasyStore 8TB drives from Best Buy are wonderful. I picked 3 of them up on sale for $120 in December. They’ve got WD reds inside.
USB 3.0 is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds the new transfer rate referred to as SuperSpeed USB (SS) that can transfer data at up to 5 Gbit/s
Third-generation SATA interfaces run with a native transfer rate of 6.0 Gbit/s … the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 4.8 Gbit/s
So it’s almost 1:1
The thing that would then determine the throughput would be the speed of the drives, and what you’re sticking the data on. As for improving the speed in linux, I found this link which might help.
