[rdiff-backup-users] remove-older-than takes hours and slows down the system....

[George Gallen]

I currently backup to a directory on the same system as the data for
an online backup system. The filesystem it's backing up has been reduced
to just about 0% space available.

I executed a rdiff-backup --force --remove-older-than mm/dd/yyyy /targetdirectory

It should have been about 60 incremental backups during that time frame, and
an overall of about 15-20gb, with maybe a 1% daily change rate of the data.

Is it normal for rdiff-backup to slow the system down to a crawl, and/or take
over 3 hours (I had to Control-C the program), and in that amount of time only
1% diskspace had been reclaimed? The total filesystem space is 18gb.

I will most likely backup the directory to tape, then I will hard delete the
incremental backup directory, and start from scratch online, unless there is
a faster way to remove the files?

This is running on a RH 7.3, The number of users is usually about 20, and is
not open to the internet.

Thanks
George