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Nick Smith wrote:
> So is the way im doing it now going to work if i need to do a restore
> down the road?
> Would doing full backups be better than incrementals?
> 
>>>From what your saying it sounds like the full backups are actually
> doing incrementals?
> Or is it because most of the files are already in the pool so it just
> does a hardlink instead?
> If i tell it to only keep 1 full backup and only do a full every 6
> months, once it does the next
> full backup does it change the hardlinks to point to the latest full
> and remove the first? or
> does it keep the initial full just to keep the hardlinks in working order?

Other people have pretty much answered your questions already, but I'll
pass on my experience with backuppc as well as an extra data point for you.

I am using the older backuppc 2.1.2pl1 from Debian stable in a few places.

Originally I was going to do a single full and forever incremental
backups (since we didn't want to delete any backups ever anyway).
However, I found the backup took longer and longer each time, because as
new files were added, the incremental backup was transferring all the
data of all new files/changed file compared to the original full. Of
course, data storage on the backup server only stored a single copy of
the files, even though they were transferred multiple times.

This was when I changed to do a full every 3 days to reduce the
bandwidth requirement, even though it increased the cpu/disk IO/time to
complete the backup.

If you want to minimise bandwidth, every backup would be a full (if
using rsync/rsyncd).

BTW, from what I know, in newer versions, each incremental is compared
to the most recent backup of any lower level. So, you could do a level
0, level 1, level 2, level 3 ..... level 9, level 0, level 1 etc...

That way, you only transfer a small amount of data each day, but still
get a quick backup time with the benefits of the incremental.

You might also want to consider that you don't really lose anything by
having lots of level, you still only restore the latest version of all
files. It isn't like doing a level 0 tape, level 1 tape, etc... you
simply restore what you want and backuppc automatically restores the
latest version of each file.

Regards,
Adam
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