Le 20/02/2014 12:32, Anton Aylward a écrit :
The SOLE purpose of doing a backup is to be able to do a restore.
In fact there are a lot of purpose, depending of what one needs. If you want to have a machine restarting immediately after a hard crash, a (system) miror is probably the best thing - not necessarily a RAID as the mirror can be off site (may be in a safe nearby).
comparing this year's results with past years results. But past years were off on backup.
then somebody confused backup and archive. Backup are for disaster recovery, archives are for eventual reading and should always be in raw readable form (simple rsync copy, no tar)
I had advised the IT manager not to take full image backups but to take differential or localized backups.
on the case you describe, this would be even worst, because you may have problem knowing where is the relevant file (specially the data needed may be spread in various places) The idea of a 'backup only what has
changed' is inherent in the way 'rsync' works. In fact 'rsync' would allow full image baseline then incremental.
rsync is very flexible, but can do much harm in bad cases. Speially you have to ask yourself: do I need --delete or not? If many things change every day, not usind delete may give enormous amounts of data, but using it may lose previous configs (for example) even worst, I once tried to use a very serious utility (unison) making use of rsync to make a mirror between two disks. That mean removing old data and adding new. I used it to make a mirror of an old disk to a new one. This ended in two disks filled with zero length files! the *new* disk was dying! it accepted writes, flagged file as new, not seeing the file write failed, and unison after that copied this file to the old disk as newer (ext4 on the two disks). guess what: I had a third copy done with dolphin as copy/paste. I only losed a handfull files, but I got shocked for a while :-)) redundency is the key, but be prepared anyway to lose files sometime. Do not lose life for that :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org