On 2008-11-29, jam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Only new files are added, old files are kept until manually deleted,
> and the only possible flaw I perceive is that ImportantFile is backed
> up, trashed and tomorrow the trashed version is saved blotting out the
> original. The daily backup is quick.
>
> Having pondered the doco I cannot see any benefit other than saving
> ImportantFile at the cost of quite a lot more complexity. What have I
> missed?
Keep reading the notes and the talk that its aim isn't so much "here is
the backup solution that should replace your existing one" as "here is
the backup solution that should replace your non-existent one". (In the
audience for the talk, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of attendees didn't
have backups of at least one machine with irreplacable data on it.) This
is why it doesn't do a lot of compare and contrast of local backup
tools: the more decisions between this-and-that backup systems with
this-and-that tradeoffs I present someone with, the less likely that
someone is to grab a drive and back something up. (People in this
scenario: stop reading the thread and umming-and-erring and go use
rdiff-backup and backup your stuff!)
Given this, it might be that you haven't missed anything: if you have a
backup solution that covers all the data loss risks you want to cover,
you're done.
The main reasons I use rdiff-backup over a hand-rolled rsync solution
is:
(a) it was quicker to set up, I'm trusting the many eyeballs in this
scenario and since I have successfully recovered files using it
(b) your ImportantFile scenario above: I do like being able to complete
recover a snapshot of the filesystem exacly as it was at the time of any
existing backup increment, including not only deleted but changed
files. That said, I don't actually do it very often.
-Mary
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
