I recently lost some files because of a bad disk - hardware problem. I do regular backups so I was not really worried, but I now see that I have a problem with my backup strategy so I'd like to know how others handle/prevent what happened to me.
I backup files using rsync and I basically have 2 types of backups. My most important files are backed up every night. I do incremental backups using: rsync -aqrlvtogS --ignore-errors --backup I keep about 4 months of backups. So if a file is damaged, missing or accidentally deleted, I can find a good file - even if, for example I screwed up the file and only discovered the problem a few days later. BUT, all the rest of my files - music, videos, pictures, etc are backed up daily and weekly on 2 different physical drives using: rsync -qrlvtogS --delete --ignore-errors I use --delete to prevent accumulating garbage on my backup disks. So here's the problem: Because of a hardware problem, several files on one of my disks were lost. As a result, the daily backup script "thought" that those files should be deleted from the daily backup. Unfortunately, I did not notice the problem. A few days later, those same files were also deleted from the weekly backup. So they are lost. So on one hand, I need --delete to avoid keeping backups of old garbage, but on the other hand, the --delete option does not know if I deleted the file or if it's gone because of a hardware problem. -- Shlomo Solomon http://the-solomons.net Claws Mail 3.17.5 - KDE Plasma 5.18.5 - Kubuntu 20.04 _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
