>>Fair enough. But less applicable in the case of backups, since restores
>>are quite rare, as I've been pointing out.
>
> I'd agree they're probably rare, and certainly less common than backups.
> But in my experience when you do perform a restore it's almost always
> the latest version you want. They should not be as rare as they are. We
> should all be in the habit of regularly performing a restore to test our
> backups are working.
Also, it's convenient to make your latest backup readily accessible so
it's very easy to get back yesterday's version of a file in case your
fingers fumbled (which might be much more frequent than drive failures).
> One advantage of the reverse-delta storage mechanism: With rdiff-backup, if
> I want to restore the latest version I can simply copy the backup repository
> (ignoring/excluding "rdiff-backup-increments" directory), I do not need to
> use rdiff-backup itself.
Another advantage is that it lets you access a host's files even when
that host is down (as long as the backup server is up, which is likely
to always be the case).
Stefan
