On 14 Jan 2021 at 11:06:48 GMT, The Natural Philosopher 
wrote:

> On 14/01/2021 08:56, Chris Green wrote:
>>  When you backup a 1TB drive do you actually copy the whole 1TB?  It's
>>  a huge waste of time and space and you can't keep so many backups.
>>  Use some form of incremental backup and also backup*selectively*.
>
> depends on what you want. I rsync huge amounts of data. Disk space is
> cheap. Recovering from data loss is not, Working out what is important
> and what is not is even more expensive.

Incremental backup as done by Time Machine allows many more backups. It's done
with hard links, so a file is backed up the first time, but hard links are
created for subsequent backups. This means that what is presented to me when I
want to do a restore from a selected date just looks an ordinary folder as it
would appear on the Desktop. I highlight one or more files/folders with the
mouse and click Restore. No farting about with command line options that I
have no interest in remembering.

Disk space may be cheap, but then you have to manage it. And remember - if you
make backup/restore complicated then noddy users won't do it.

--
Tim

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05