handyfloss

Well, probably not first, and not a big “use” either, but still…

Yesterday I mistakenly deleted an important file, and hadn’t noticed until 10 minutes ago. I make daily backups, using rsync, as I mentioned some time ago, in this blog entry.

The “bad” part is that, since the error was made yesterday, the last backup (made last night) was “corrupted” (had the file missing). The good part is that I make incremental daily backups of the last seven days, then weekly of the last 4 weeks, then monthly of the last 6 months (son-father-grandfather backup). I just checked the backup of the day before yesterday, and there it was the deleted file!

You can make an idea of the efficency of incremental backups if I say that I keep 15 backups of my home/ directory (1 “current”, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 3 montly, because I started 3 months ago) in two different machines (appart from my own, of course), which would amount to about 43GB in each machine, were they all complete copies. Being as they are incremental, they actually fill up 5.9GB of disk space in either machine (more than 7 times less).

For an idea of what incremental backups are, read this link of my blog entry. Actually, I also started a Wikipedia entry for “incremental backup”. Maybe you can watch it before someone sensible deletes it (it was a redirection to the backup rotation scheme” entry, but I do not think they are the same thing). You could even add something to that entry, to make it more complete.