Posted by Stuart Miller on 12/04/06 22:30

"(PeteCresswell)" <x@y.Invalid> wrote in message
news:e1r8n2hvjel5oi51a2ta7rvjfc2phbo7r2@4ax.com...
> Per Stuart Miller:
>>The volatile stuff - documents, new pics, etc is actually quit small, and
>>backs up to cd- r or dvd-r in a few minutes.
>>When I get all the new pics properly labelled and indexed, then I re-do
>>the
>>main backup.
>
> Sounds like you're just doing file copys.
>
> If so, how do you identify the change files?
> --
> PeteCresswell
I worked with incremental backups some years ago, and never had a good
experience with it.

Now I just back up an entire section of the server if I know it has been
updated. From a computing and copying point of view, I am doing a lot of
extra work, but the computer does that without complaints. I have a home
office, so I set the backups to run while I am having dinner. For example, I
know for sure that I have a 100% backup of my business correspondence as of
last night, I don't have to check daily incremental backups to see where a
specific letter is backed up. I also keep the weekend backups for a few
weeks, and the month end backups for a few months in case I have deleted
something I need. If I didn't write any letters today, I don't run the
correspondence backup script. Correspondence which I may want for furture
reference but is no longer current is moved to an archive area, which only
needs to be backed up when it is added to. This signficantly reduces the
daily backup size.

Right now I know what area have been updated, so it is easy. When I get more
people updating different areas, I will write a simple script to look for
the newest file in an area & compare it to a backup log.

The few times I have had to restore data ( I hate maxtor drives) it has been
totally painless.

Stuart

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