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That's not incremental
Authored by: advocate on Apr 16, '04 06:37:11PM

You seem to be using a curious definition of 'incremental'. An incremental backup is a difference between the last full backup set plus all the incremental backups taken since then and the current state of the filesystem. Sure, what you do doesn't copy any files except the ones that have changed, but for any file that has changed, you copy the whole file, and you also keep around (yes, I know it's via hard link) all the files that haven't changed.

The reason I point this out is that I'm terribly disappointed by the lack of functionality in supposedly professional-grade backup solutions. Even Retrospect doesn't cut it: it backs up entire files when even a byte has changed, and it doesn't allow snapshots to be rotated off. Nobody seems to have anything worth using. Hey, I'm willing to go for an enterprise-grade solution; are there any?



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That's not incremental
Authored by: advocate on Apr 16, '04 06:42:43PM

Sorry, I should have made it clear that I don't really care about network bandwidth, I care about long-term storage requirements. So sure, rsync will only spend a handful of packets to send over that one byte difference in a ten gigabyte file, but you're keeping both copies of the whole ten gigabyte file (with a one byte difference between them) on the backup disk afterwards.

It's too bad about resource/info forks. If there weren't multiple forks to deal with, just storing binary diffs by timestamp would do nicely, I would think. And once in a while you'd want to merge the older diffs into the full backup for performance.



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