First thing's first: This is excellent software and I'm very grateful
to the authors. Thank you very much for your hard work.
I have some constructive criticism regarding the way the config.pl file
requires me to set the number of backups and the
intervals. I think it's rather unintuitive.
As an example, I started out with:
$Conf{FullPeriod} = 6.97;
$Conf{FullKeepCnt} = [4, 2, 6, 2];
This gives me 48 weeks of backups.
But then I decide to do a full backup every 2 days instead of every week,
because
I've decided that I want the additional accuracy and that my cpu and
network can handle it. So I change to
$Conf{FullPeriod} = 1.97;
But I now have only 13 weeks of backups!
What I really want is about 1 year of backups (like the 48 weeks I had
in the original configuration), so I also have to make this change in
order to achieve roughly the same intervals that I originally had:
$Conf{FullKeepCnt} = [0, 0, 4, 2, 5, 2]
This is roughly equivalent the the previous backup strategy, with 50
weeks of data retained. (This was not a simple step. It took me quite
a bit of thinking to come up with this array.)
I think what most people can easily visualize as a backup stragety is
something like this:
Do/keep a daily backup every day for the past week. (And specify whether
it should be incremental or full)
Keep a weekly backup for the past 4 weeks.
Keep a monthly backup for the past 12 months.
Keep a yearly backup for the past 3 years.
Something like that. Easy for the user, but possiby harder for the
guys writing the code. If it can be avoided, making one change
(eg: $Conf{FullPeriod}) should not require an additional change
(eg: $Conf{FullKeepCnt}) in order to prevent unexpected results (eg: 48 weeks of
backups retained turning into 13 weeks of backups retained)
Thanks again for the excellent software. I hope my criticism can help it
to become even more excellent.
-Rob
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