Re: Homebuilt NAS Advice
On Sun, 09 Aug 2020 10:53:30 -0400
Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> 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.
>
> Also, it's convenient to make your latest backup readily accessible so
> it's very easy to get back yesterday's version of a file in case your
> fingers fumbled (which might be much more frequent than drive failures).
Understood. I have indeed done that many times ...
> > 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.
>
> Another advantage is that it lets you access a host's files even when
> that host is down (as long as the backup server is up, which is likely
> to always be the case).
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but why can't you do that
with ordinary forward deltas, as long as all the necessary information
is stored with the backups? Are you saying that classic forward-delta
based systems don't store backup metadata (or whatever the right term
is) on the backup server, but on the host? What happens, then, if the
host's storage is unrecoverable?
Celejar
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