On 14/01/2021 11:43, TimS wrote:
> 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.
>
well what I have on my SECOND drive is  complete directory trees of
three machines and its all exported by NFS so all I have to do is mount
it , navigate to the file I need and move it across to where it needs to go.

Hardly onerous!

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"

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