I was talking about our backup strategy to my wife tonight (2 sets of
full backups, nightly incremental backups onto CDRW: again, 2 CDs that
we cycle between), and we started discussing what seems to be a huge
hole in this common strategy.

Namely, if you damage or lose any file you've worked on since the last
full backup, and don't notice within two days, then the work will be
lost - wiped out by the nightly incrementals!

This likelihood obviously increases as the length of time between full
backups increases.  E.g. for us, we only fill an incremental CD a few
times a year, so we only do a few full backups in a year.

What's the accepted practice for solving this problem?  I thought of
keeping a 3rd CDRW for the incrementals, that only gets pulled out and
used say on the 1st of each month.  At least then you have a month to
realise you have some damaged or lost files.  ANd you could I suppose
extend this to have 2-monthly, 4-monthly media you used, and have some
complex scheme for pushing and popping them, so that for N media, you
could be safe for 2^N months.  But that seems complex.

luke

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