Linux Backup – Best Linux Backup Solutions Using inotify

Recent versions of GNU find have the action "-quit", which causes find to immediately stop searching:

— Action: -quit

Exit immediately (with return value zero if no errors have occurred). This is different to ‘-prune’ because ‘-prune’ only applies to the contents of pruned directories, whilt ‘-quit’ simply makes find stop immediately. No child processes will be left running, but no more files specified on the command line will be processed. For example, find /tmp/foo /tmp/bar -print -quit will print only ‘/tmp/foo’. Any command lines which have been built by ‘-exec ... +’ or ‘-execdir ... +’ are invoked before the program is exited.

You could use a find-expression to find files that have changed, and use -quit to stop as soon as you find one. That should be faster than find continuing its scan.

-quit was added in fileutils V4.2.3

This might not be possible in your situation, so I hope I don't get down-voted in that case, but it might be more efficient to change your backup strategy. If you back up specific data instead of VM snapshots, your backups would run much quicker, and it would be easier to capture changes.

Depending on your VMs and what they're used for, you can just have them back up data to where you store the snapshots now daily (or whatever schedule is appropriate), and then JungleDisk can back up just the data. That would more efficiently transfer changed files, and the space required for backups as well as time needed would be reduced. In addition, you could still take snapshots to retain, and just do that much less often (weekly, for example).

In this case, you could always just bring up a new VM and restore data, or use an older snapshot to restore the VM, and then use the data backup to restore to the most recent point.