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How long has it been since you last tested your backups? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 38 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:07AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:07AM (#258682) Journal

    And how is backup different? The proper way to prevent data corruption is the revision control. Backup cannot detect the original data corruption because the latter is indistinguishable from a cromulent edit. If a file becomes corrupt and then gets backed up in a corrupt state, now the backup is corrupt. If you have an older snapshot, you may be in luck, but what are the chances of that in your case? With mirrors, one can mirror, say, to target 1 on every 1st and to target 2 on every 15th of a month, and that guarantees a 2-to-4-week stale snapshot, so the situation is basically the same.

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  • (Score: 2) by basicbasicbasic on Friday November 06 2015, @04:56PM

    by basicbasicbasic (411) on Friday November 06 2015, @04:56PM (#259531)

    Having a single backup isn't something I'd recommend because, as you point out, it's really no better than mirroring. But most backup solutions do more than that.

    I can only speak for Time Machine (the backup solution built in to OSX) but it does hourly backups for the past day, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for every previous week for as long as you have the disk space (mine go back to January 2013 when I first switched it on). It also lets you swap in multiple backup drives and will alternate backups between them if you have them connected at the same time.

    If a file has become corrupted you skim back through the copies until you find the last good copy (it has a very nice interface for doing this).