Thank God for backups!

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 10:54 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> If, instead, you make full backups every 60 days, then 100GB will give 
> you about 11 months of backups. On the other hand, if you did full 
> backups every 14 days, then 100GB would last you only 3 months.


Ah, so the backup will just grow in size forever then ! :-O

I don't want a backup to go back in time 3 years ago and restore
particular files. All I want is a snapshot, as current as possible,
of /home, so that if the system crashes, I can restore my data as it was
just before the crash, not as it was last week or last year, so as to
lose as little data as possible.

So what I had in mind was:

Do an initial full back-up, then:

1) Monday to Saturday : automatic incremental backups at night, send it
to a dedicated headless machine via a high-speed/Gigabit Ethernet
network.
2) Sunday: delete all previous backups, and replace with fresh full
backup.
3) back to 2)

So basically I am asking for the back-up system to automatically
"rotate" the backups so as to keep only one full backup, to save space,
and because the most recent backup is the only one I am going to want
when restoring the system after a crash anyway.
That's also means I don't need/want to compress the data. It would take
hours on my machine (I don't have a "Niagara" processor unfortunately...
just an old 1.5GHz CPU). 

Maybe these features could be added to sbackup, but I guess in the
meantime I have no choice but to get my hands dirty and take the time to
learn how to use rsync and bash scripting to do what I want to do
then :-(


--
Vince