31–40 of 57 posts
Need to combine this with LVM or BTRFS or similar to be a true snapshot. Rsnapshot supports LVM snapshot pretty good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "borg" has basically solved backups permanently. It's deduplicated, even across snapshots, compressed, and end-to-end encrypted. Deduplication helps minimize space, but isn't it a major liability in backups? I mean, what happens when you try to restore your backups but a lone sector holding a file from way back in the past happens to not be recoverable? Doesn't it mean that no matter how frequent your backups are,…
This is bordering on paranoia. If the bad sector contains a critical part of the filesystem, you're going to lose everything anyway. Do modern disks even have physical "sectors" anymore? Isn't it all virtual? Without dedup you're just going to backup less stuff, which is far worse.
What? You actually think that the mere idea of a backup getting corrupted is something that is "bordering on paranoia"? Have you ever heard of redundancy or even RAID?
> If the bad sector contains a critical part of the filesystem, you're going to lose everything anyway.
Do you honestly failed to understand that the problem is actually the "lose everything" part?
TM integration is just so convenient...
[0] Not strictly the right name but I've forgotten. Y!uk people of that era know what I mean.
If we spoke about a Linux box, one that prudently ran ZFS, or XFS on top of LVM, it would be possible to make a snapshot before the diffing and sending, so that the snapshot would be indeed point-in-time. IDK if whatever macOS uses for the filesystem supports snapshots. Otherwise, I think, restic or kopia are better for proper backups, and Syncthing for keeping a mirror copy. But the simplicity of this script in char…
An important feature of backups is the ability to restore them. As much as I love restic, I have at least one backup target with hard links.
This would of course also be possible on Linux (using *notify), and there are some projects which try to do this, but it's really hard to do it reliably. You might argue that this feature is less important nowadays because NVME SSDs are so fast, but still, I remember very well how astonished I was that creating a new time machine snapshot on OS X Leopard took mere seconds.
This is just half of what Time Machine does. What people are constantly missing is that Apple Time Machine is fast , as it does not need to walk through the whole filesystem to find changed files. Thanks to FSEvents, introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, it knows which directories actually contain changed files and hence usually only needs to check a small fraction of the filesystem. (Not sure if it still works that way af…
This is just half of what Time Machine does. What people are constantly missing is that Apple Time Machine is fast , as it does not need to walk through the whole filesystem to find changed files. Thanks to FSEvents, introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, it knows which directories actually contain changed files and hence usually only needs to check a small fraction of the filesystem. (Not sure if it still works that way af…
They are atomic and require zero downtime. They can be encrypted and resent to other machines. Cloning whole machines from them is easy and efficient.