G T Smith wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Sunday 2007-05-27 at 07:53 -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote:
That's not completely true... old Vax VMS file names had also a version number. You could have "file.ext;1", "...;2", etc, so you could go back and retrieve an older version of the file you were working with. Nice feature, except if the admin had limited the number of versions to two or three... which my teacher did. And there's a even a very limited counterpart in the Gnu tools: The "cp" command's --backup and related options. You can also set up rdiff-backup to periodically make incremental snapshots of select portions of your file system. But of course, a real backup and archive system is an important ingredient in any data safety setup. Absolutely.
Well, "data safety" setup is difficult for home use. However, as has been pointed out before, usb-storage is cheap. For example, I use rsnapshot to do full backups, using symlinks. That's smart, because it works automatically, and it in fact "only safes" differential data, while still maintaining a "full backup anytime" structure that makes it ease to revert to previous (backup-)versions. You can configure it to backup yearly, monthly, daily, hourly, minutely..., whatever you need, according to your needs.
But you might work all day on a report, and on a stupid moment obliterate it all. We all do such things some times... Or after long work, you decide your last hour has been full of errors and it would be better to go back in time. If the software is designed to save a version history of the file, it might save our day on both cases.
Sure, but again, if you are prone to "last hour deletions" or if your work is valuable to you in any other respect, simply do a "quarter-hourly"-backup and the worst that can happen is that you loose 15min of your valuable time. Another option could be subversion, if version-management really matters.
Ummm...
[...]
Backup does give some data security but one also needs to be able to handle the situation where one gets a gradual corruption of data. (A couple of early viruses only made small changes to data over time, by the time the infection had been detected the integrity of the backup sets was at best suspect). This also the case with a failing hard drive, or drive support hardware.
The only solution I can see is the use of external media sets. While commercial outfits can afford the hardware and personnel to make differential systems work well with external media and more sophisticated strategies, there is not really anything reliable and easy to use for home users in this category.
Well, while this may be true, I would think that most home users will be ok with an automated, regularly scheduled backup of different hours/days,weeks/monthes/years... to external media. In case that does not suffice, you might add a few more portable usb-harddisks, that you store externally at a remote location away from your computer. If that does not do the trick, imho your needs are ripe for a professional backup solution that needs a professional budget, accordingly. regards Eberhard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org