Are periodic full backups really necessary on an incremental backup setup?

Posted by user2229980 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by user2229980
Published on 2013-10-23T07:11:40Z Indexed on 2013/10/23 10:02 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 277

I intend to use an old computer I have as a remote backup server for myself and a few other people. We are all geographically separated, and the plan is to do incremental daily backups using rsync and ssh. My original idea was to make one initial full backup then never again have to deal with the overhead of doing it, and from that moment on only copy the files changed since the last backup. I've been told that this could be bad, but I fail to understand why. Since each snapshot is comprised of hard links to the unchanged files plus the original changed ones, isn't it going to be identical to a new full backup? Why would I want to make another full backup?

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about backup

Related posts about rsync