On Wed Oct 2, 2024 at 12:33 AM BST, Default User wrote: > May I ask why you decided to switch from rsnapshot to rdiff-backup, and > then to borg?
Sure! At the time I was using rsnapshot, I was subscribed to some very high traffic mailing lists (such as LKML), and storing the mail in Maildir format (=1 file per email). rsnapshot's design of lots of hardlinks for files that are present in more than one backup increment proved very expensive at the time (I switched to rdiff-backup in around 2006-2007). I have a lot of time for rdiff-backup, I think it's very well designed. It addressed the problem I had with rsnapshot, and the backup format is simple enough and well documented that you could feasibly write other tools to read from it, should you need to. That gave me confidence. The main issue I hit with rdiff-backup was if I wanted to move files or directories containing large files around on my storage: that resulted in the new locations being considered "new", and the next backup increment being comparatively large. This reduced the number of increments I could fit into my backup storage (= shorter horizon for restores, although I've never had to restore back in time a great deal), and I found I started limiting the amount of moving around I was doing of large file (size) trees, to avoid that happening. I switched to Borg in Summer 2020 mainly to address that (Borg de-duplicates files and stores them content-addressible, of a fashion, so file moves don't grow increment sizes). At the time rdiff-backup was not being actively developed; that has changed. I was nervous about Borg's significant increase in complexity, but I've been running it for four years now and it's been fine. -- Please do not CC me for listmail. 👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland ✎ j...@debian.org 🔗 https://jmtd.net
