Are periodic full backups really necessary on an incremental backup setup?
- by user2229980
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?
