~/enormousfiles

[sniffnoy]

Something clever I thought of today:

So I've got this enormous file on my hard drive -- about 35 GB. While it's enormous, it's not particularly important; I haven't deleted it only because there's no need to. But it's in a directory with lots of other important stuff; actually, it's in a subdirectory of a directory with lots of important stuff. So when I'm doing backups, it's a pain, because I have to go in and copy everything in this directory except this one file in a subdirectory -- the file isn't important enough to be worth slowing down my backups for.

Solution I thought of today: make a new directory, ~/enormousfiles, put the file in there, and put a symlink to it in the original directory. Yay!

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Why do I feel like all the backup tools I can think of follow symlinks? Maybe I'm wrong about that, it's been awhile since I bothered to back up anything. :-P

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Well, I was just planning on using cp -u. :)

(Is that a bad idea? I have no idea. It's been really slow in the past but I've never really bothered to find anything better, and I figured most of that slowness was probably just due the media I was backing it up to. Still, whatever it is, I imagine they must have a "don't follow symlinks" option. Or if it's really advanced, a "mark this file to not be backed up" option...)

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Oh, gotcha. Well, rsync is able to send only the delta between the source and destination, which is the tool I would think to use (though its command line flags are notoriously obtuse).

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Hm -- wouldn't that require an actual computer on the other end? I usually just make occasional small backups to a USB drive (of the most important stuff) and larger less frequent backups of nearly everything to an external hard drive.