For more than two years I am furious about what standard backup programs deliver today. Yes, they provide you safety by making copies of your data reoccuringly ensuring that you can copy it back upon necessity. But when you have a closer look at what they really do especially in the sense of versioning it suddently turns into a surprise. I stumbled over that when I investigated the following scenario more thoroughly:
Scenario
For several years now I administer a local network with some workstations and two servers. For historical reasons one of the server is a Linux box (LinS) which is mainly responsible for doing the internet-related routing and similar stuff whilst the Windows Server (WinS) acts as simple file share server for the core application. Safety of the data is considered key in this situation – especially concerning the Windows Server (loosing the internet access for a day or two is also not eligible, but survivable). Still both servers feature a RAID1 system. Previously, backup of data for the Windows Server was done via DVD+RW with a simple commercial backup software. As the RAID1 array in the WinS already ensured that ongoing failures did not cause an unrevokable data loss, still “pushing the DEL button” on the keyboard could cause an entire data loss (this is also the reason why “only backing up your data on a RAID array” is never a good idea alone). Consequently, the major task in this situation for this commercial software was to provide differential backups such that – if required – it would be possible to restore a previous state (to be also immune against data that was garbled some days before).
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