On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 06:05:34AM +0000, [email protected] wrote: > I have about a dozen separate directories I would like to backup with Tarsnap. > I could create one archive per directory, or one big archive with all the > directories in it. Is there any reason to prefer one method over the other? It > doesn't seem like either method would impact the difficulty of restoring a > particular file. Would creating multiple archives use more bandwidth?
What it would change, however, is your ability to delete one particular archive: if you happen to have some large files (sometimes mistakenly) backed-up in one of your directories that eat up a lot of space, you might want to delete the related archive to avoid paying for it after some time. Deletion is an all-or-nothing deal: you cannot delete only some files in a given archive. Having several of them gives you a finer-grained control on how long to keep each directory. (Note also that deduplication could make this point irrelevant. YMMV.) Best, -- Gabriel
