From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Dec 5 11:38:28 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D9BE1540E for ; Sun, 5 Dec 1999 11:38:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA49174; Sun, 5 Dec 1999 14:42:37 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199912051942.OAA49174@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: Is my backup system sane? In-Reply-To: <19991205125805.C40370@uberhacker.org> from "Paul D. Schmidt" at "Dec 5, 1999 12:58:05 pm" To: pds@uberhacker.org (Paul D. Schmidt) Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 14:42:37 -0500 (EST) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Paul D. Schmidt wrote, > I do a level 0 dump at the end of the month > > I then cycle through 4 (or 5 if necessary) "Sunday" tapes doing level 1 > backups > > Then Monday-Saturday I do a level 2 backup to the proper tape for the day... There is a little trade-off here. If a file changes once on Monday and never again during the week, it is still going to get backed up every day of the week. For the simplicity of your scheme you pay by having the size of that level 2 backup grow monotonically. If for your system(s) the size is not really a factor, then I don't see why the simplicity trade might be worth it for you. I assume from the way you phrased some things that you are backing up soley for full-system recovery (to return the machine to its last functioning state) after a catastrophic event. However, if you also back up to save old "snapshots" (when a luser comes to you, "I accidently deleted a file last week, is it backed up somewhere?") of the system, that may call for a more complex approach. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message