VAC(1) VAC(1)
NAME
vac, unvac - create, extract a vac archive on Venti
SYNOPSIS
vac [ -mqsv ] [ -a vacfile ] [ -b blocksize ] [ -d
oldvacfile ] [ -e exclude ] [ -f vacfile ] [ -i name ] [ -h
host ] [ -x excludefile ] file ...
unvac [ -Tcdtv ] [ -h host ] vacfile [ file ... ]
DESCRIPTION
Vac creates an archival copy of Plan 9 file trees on Venti.
It can be used to build a simple backup system. One of the
unusual properties of Venti is that duplicate blocks are
detected and coalesced. When vac is used on a file tree
that shares data with an existing archive, the consumption
of storage will be approximately equal to an incremental
backup. This reduction in storage consumption occurs trans-
parently to the user.
As an optimization, the -d and -q options, described below,
can be used to explicitly create an archive relative to an
existing archive. These options do not change the resulting
archive generated by vac, but simply reduce the number of
write operations to Venti.
The output of vac is the hexadecimal representation of the
SHA1 fingerprint of the root of the archive, in this format:
vac:64daefaecc4df4b5cb48a368b361ef56012a4f46
The options are:
-a vacfile
Specifies that vac should create or update a backup
archive, inserting the files under an extra two levels
of directory hierarchy named yyyy/mmdd (year, month,
day) in the style of the dump file system (see Plan 9's
fs(4)). If vacfile already exists, an additional
backup day is added to the existing hierarchy, behaving
as though the -d flag was specified giving the most
recent backup tree in the archive. Typically, this
option is used as part of a nightly backup script.
This option cannot be used with -d or -f.
-b blocksize
Specifies the block size that data will be broken into.
The units for the size can be specified by appending
`k' to indicate kilobytes. The default is 8k. The
size must be in the range of 512 bytes to 52k.
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-d oldvacfile
Reduce the number of blocks written to Venti by compar-
ing the files to be stored with the contents of an
existing vac file tree whose score is stored in
oldvacfile.
-e exclude
Do not include the file or directory specified by
exclude. This option may be repeated multiple times.
Exclude can be a shell pattern as accepted by rc(1),
with one extension: ... matches any sequence of charac-
ters including slashes.
-f vacfile
The results of vac are placed in vacfile, or the stan-
dard output if no file is given.
-i name
Include standard input as one of the input files, stor-
ing it in the archive with the specified name.
-h host
The network address of the Venti server. The default
is taken from the environment variable venti.
-m Expand and merge any vac archives that are found while
reading the input files. This option is useful for
building an archive from a collection of existing
archives. Each archive is inserted into the new
archive as if it had been unpacked in the directory in
which it was found. Multiple archives can be unpacked
in a single directory and the contents will be merged.
To be detected, the archives must end in `.vac'. Note,
an archive is inserted by simply copying the root fin-
gerprint and does not require the archive to be
unpacked.
-q Increase the performance of the -a or -d options by
detecting unchanged files based on a match of the files
name and other meta data, rather than examining the
contents of the files.
-s Print out various statistics on standard error.
-v Produce more verbose output on standard error, includ-
ing the name of the files added to the archive and the
vac archives that are expanded and merged.
-x excfile
Read exclude patterns from the file excfile. Blank
lines and lines beginning with # are ignored. All
other lines should be of the form include pattern or
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exclude pattern . When considering whether to include a
directory or file in the vac archive, the earliest
matching pattern in the file applies. The patterns are
the same syntax accepted by the -e option. This option
may be repeated multiple times.
Unvac lists or extracts files stored in the vac archive
vacfile, which can be either a vac archive string in the
format given above or the name of a file containing one. If
file arguments are given, only those files or directories
will be extracted. The options are:
-T Set the modification time on extracted files to the
time listed in the archive.
-c Write extracted files to standard output instead of
creating a file.
-d Reduce the number of blocks read from Venti by compar-
ing the files to be stored with their counterparts in
the file system. This option cannot be used with -c.
-t Print a list of the files to standard output rather
than extracting them.
-v If extracting files, print the name of each file and
directory to standard error. If listing files, print
metadata in addition to the names.
SOURCE
/usr/local/plan9/src/cmd/vac
SEE ALSO
vacfs(4), venti(8)
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