slightly OT - backup strategy

[Shlomo Solomon]

I recently lost some files because of a bad disk - hardware problem.

I do regular backups so I was not really worried, but I now see that I
have a problem with my backup strategy so I'd like to know how others
handle/prevent what happened to me.

I backup files using rsync and I basically have 2 types of backups.

My most important files are backed up every night. I do incremental
backups using:    rsync -aqrlvtogS --ignore-errors  --backup
I keep about 4 months of backups. So if a file is damaged, 
missing or accidentally deleted, I can find a good file - even if, for
example I screwed up the file and only discovered the problem a few
days later.

BUT, all the rest of my files - music, videos, pictures, etc are backed
up daily and weekly on 2 different physical drives using:
rsync -qrlvtogS --delete --ignore-errors 
I use --delete to prevent accumulating garbage on my backup disks.

So here's the problem: Because of a hardware problem, several files on
one of my disks were lost. As a result, the daily backup script
"thought" that those files should be deleted from the daily backup.
Unfortunately, I did not notice the problem. A few days later, those
same files were also deleted from the weekly backup. So they are lost.

So on one hand, I need --delete to avoid keeping backups of old
garbage, but on the other hand, the --delete option does not know if I
deleted the file or if it's gone because of a hardware problem.



-- 
Shlomo Solomon
http://the-solomons.net
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