SuSe tool needed for " day to day data control".

[Kuba Ober]

> I want to see the day to day changes of my data on my Suse 7.3 server for
> backupreasons. Is there a small tool for this kind of "data control"?

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/star.html

star -r diffopts=not,data,atime

may do the job, removing "data" will have it compare the file data. What do 
you need this "data control" for? Backups would handle it automatically.



Personally, for quite a while I've been using dump on the root ext3 
partitions, and xfsdump on data-carrying xfs partitions. A few months ago 
I've switched to star and life has become somewhat easier. It beats one heck 
out of dump, tar and cpio.

If you dump to tapes, you'll need to write a small utility to reblock the data 
and provide a decent buffer to keep the drive streaming. Note that dd is 
utterly useless with tape drives.

I use a 128mb mlock()ed FIFO with 0/90% low/high watermarks. I.e. the data 
stops going out to the tape drive when the FIFO gets empty, and restarts when 
it's about 90% full, which in my case is enough time to get the LTO II drive 
to start writing before the FIFO gets full (stalling the star process). I 
only use the tape drive's built-in compression, as it's fast enough to keep 
streaming, and doesn't bog down the server's CPU. With LTO II and a 2.4GHz 
XEON, the gzip that comes with RHEL4.4 isn't fast enough to keep it streaming 
even if set to the lowest compression.

Cheers, Kuba