On Sat, Aug 08, 2020 at 10:22:51PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
Fair enough. But less applicable in the case of backups, since restores are quite rare, as I've been pointing out.
I'd agree they're probably rare, and certainly less common than backups. But in my experience when you do perform a restore it's almost always the latest version you want. They should not be as rare as they are. We should all be in the habit of regularly performing a restore to test our backups are working.
One advantage of the reverse-delta storage mechanism: With rdiff-backup, if I want to restore the latest version I can simply copy the backup repository (ignoring/excluding "rdiff-backup-increments" directory), I do not need to use rdiff-backup itself. Which could be useful if the backup tool breaks, or you can't easily install it on a restore target for whatever reason (It requires Python 2 for example and that becomes harder to get). Or if a catastrophic bug in the backup software means the incremental storage scheme is corrupted in some way.
-- Jonathan Dowland