Tobi Waves

With todays low disk prices, it becomes intriguing to use several large harddisks as backup media. On the simples level they can be used like tapse to store dump files. But having all this quickly accessible storage space, it would be way cool to have some snapshot like quality where the backups are readily accessible by the users. Today I read about a cool idea for backup which is exactly what I have been wishing for the program implementing this is called FauBackup (faubackup.sourceforge.net ...). I could smack me for not thinking off this myself. Anyhow, here is how it works.

First Day Make a full copy (file by file) of the work partition to the backup partition.

Second and every following Day Walk the work disk and compare the file i-node change time of the files with the time the last backup was taken. Anything that staid the same gets hard linked from the previous backup to the current backup. Everything that has changed gets copied over.

Additionally compressing the files in the backup could lead to significantly lower disk usage. The advantages of this approach are: a) Users can restore their own files by just going into the backup partition. What I am not clear yet, is how to prevent them from modifying the backup. b) Backup space requirements are minimal as only changed files go into the new backup and old ones are hard linked. c) if we run out of space old backups can simply be removed as all backups are complete and independent of each other.

Now I just have to decide which computer is going to be my first victim. And I have to figure out if I am going to be stubborn and write my own implemntation implemntation of this idea or if I can convince myself to use faubackup.