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.
>
Exactly, my backups are like that.  Every one of them looks exactly
like my normal home directory, just copy the files back as needed.


> 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.
>
Yes, again very true, I am just about my only user (possibly 'noddy')
but I'm lazy, automatic backups are the only reliable ones!

--
Chris Green
·

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