X-no-Archive:yes
Note that this seems to parallel the distinction made my several systems,
and which finally came to Windows 95, and has been better refined since: OS
(Windows), data (My Documents / Documents and Settings), apps (Program
Files). Of course, that's probably WHY Win95 started doing this. It worked
well on several other systems. It requires less worry, but risks more than
date-based backups schemes, as some changed OS or app file may get missed.
OTOH, and we saw this with our DR plan on our 3000, since I insisted that we
leave more and more up during the backup. It can be tricky to make sense out
of how and when to restore particular app or OS files, and it complicated
our DR plan.

Years ago, when I was working in a NetWare 3 shop, a friend had given me a
copy of USAH (UNIX System Administration Handbook) - the edition with the
yellow cover by Nemeth, Snyder, and Seebass. I mentioned to him the "Towers
of Hanoi" backup rotation that it described, and he replied that "these
days", most everyone just took a full backup everyday. Now, that may not
have been true for large shops. But it has since intrigued me, how this
disparity waxes and wanes. That's changed since, and it appears to be
changing again. Backup and tape technology had caught up with disk sizes, so
it really was trivial for a lot of shops to do exactly this. In fact,
because of our tight backup window, I worked out a scheme to first backup
only those data files that had changed, and then the remaining unchanged
data files, instead of backing up all data all at once, and the difference
between the two was so trivial that it made it not worth doing.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
Backup us much as you can as often as you can.
Then figure out how long to keep it.

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