On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Jon Biddell wrote: > Monday night - Incremental - Monday's files Tuesday night - Incremental > - Monday's files, Tuesday's files Wednesday night - Incremental - > Monday's files, Tuesday's files' Wednesday's files Thursday night - > Incremental - Monday's files, Tuesday's files, Wednesday's files, > Thursday's files Friday night - FULL BACKUP - all archive bits reset
I think it less confusing and on the whole safer to always perform NORMAL backup - ie a full dump of the entire disk contents - nightly. This will give you the ability to fully recover a trashed system from ANY of your backup tapes ie redundant disaster recovery. Disaster recovery from an incremental backup set is more complicated and prone to failure (only one tape has a full backup, the others are just changed files from which a full recovery isn't possible). **flashing lights warning*** partial backups are an invitation to disaster. Tapes are fragile media - they can fail if exposed to excessive heat, moisture or magnetic source (don't forget cosmic radiation, etc). No matter what rotation cycle you choose don't forget to have someone take a backup tape offsite & regularly (daily=optimal, once a week=realistic??) exchange it. Isn't backup fun? :-) -=-=-==-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Graeme Robinson - Graenet consulting www.graenet.com - internet solutions -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==---=-=--=-=-= -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
