I still see a problem. Doesn't damage to an early diff in a long diff chain needed to recover a file, make data recovery either much harder or impossible?
only if you want to recover stuff as old as or older than that increment.
if you want the most recent or more recent than the damaged file you would be fine.
as I said earlier, the most recent backup is a straight copy away. Its just a mirror like rsync, you don't need any special tools at all to recover your most recent backup.
The diffs only come into play when you want *older* stuff. In a disaster recovery situation (complete lost data from source) you probably want to get the most recent backup.
The advantage of this sort of scheme over tape is that you get to see the errors straight away - hard drives tend to complain on write errors more than read errors. And you can fix them with standard tools like fsck. CDs and tapes don't really complain until you read them again, and go oh crap that data is actually there. So you can check the consistency of the backups pretty easily. maybe i should do a slug talk on rdiff-backup...
dave -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
