On 12/09/2010 02:49 PM, betty wrote:
> thx, steve,alan, joseph and anyone i forgot !
> good pick up  ; i AM doing backups with names of the month, so it IS 
> backing up everything each time since it is a different name. i 
> understand that but was doing it because i was so paranoid that it 
> would miss something ...  so i have two months backups on the ext hdd  
> - oct and august. usually when i do the next backup, i put in the new 
> month and delete the  oldest one. but once again, it is backing up 
> everything of course.
>
> so, should i try to rename the october file then just always use that 
> for backups. ? or should i just call everything october from now on, 
> hehehe. fine with me, easy to remember.
There is a program out there that does something similar to this.  Its 
called BackupPC, and here is its work-flow in a nutshell:

Create a directory for each machine to be backed up
Create a directory for each backup to be performed (one per day/week/etc)
Copy all links (hard links) from previous backup
Read a file from the target over ssh/rsync
Is this file already in the backup?
   Yes - Has It Changed?
     Yes - Add file to pool, overwrite old hard link to point to new file
     No - Leave link alone
   No - Leave link alone
Read next file and continue

This causes the system to do a incremental backup every day, but it acts 
like a full backup.  Files are removed from the pool once it is A) 
deleted & B) no longer referenced from an old backup.  How long it keeps 
backups and when it creates a new file regardless (i.e. full backup) is 
configurable.  This program is especially useful for backing up multiple 
machines (as it is smart enough to recognize same files from multiple 
machines), and I know this is not your case... But I thought maybe the 
workflow could be useful for you to look at in designing your own backup 
policy.

Kevin Fries

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