jdelima wrote:
If you have all of the hourly data essentially versioned and incorporated into the daily, then Joe wants to restore from 3 days ago, if he has a file there that he has changed every single hour for that particular day, then he has 24 possible files to restore! It becomes a versioning nightmare. Though my example is extreme it's possible.
Yeah, but that is what computers are good at, though. You can even put a simple UI on this, where the most recent version (the last edited version before its untimely deletion) is the only thing you see, unless you want to delve deeper into the depths of versions of the file.
Also consider what is currently done for backups. People manually, or to a schedule, do point in time backups. Not as frequently as time machine, but it still happens. They have the exact same issues, with the exception that TM may have people becoming relaxed about their data, falsely believing it always going to be in a backup set somewhere.
Yeah, point-in-time backups are always an issue, because they are just a snapshot, and not a journal of things done to change a file, so you can't recover something if it was never in a point-in-time backup.
Sure it has it's flaws, but overall it's better there than not.
I totally agree with that. Getting people to use some backup (even if flawed) is way better than the dismal state of backups for end users. I guess I'm just advocating for improving even further the state of backups, to a point where you can actually rely on them 99.999%.
In case anyone is interested, I have been participating in an Open Source backup project "Box Backup" for the last few years. It supports the keeping of deleted files as long as the backup server has space left. It also solves another TM problem, in that it backs up only what changed in a large file (like a Parallels virtual Disk), so you don't need to do full backups of every file every time it changes. It has many other features as well, such as network backups, encrypted backups, and multiple platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux, and more).
Go to
http://www.boxbackup.org/ to check it out.
This, however is not a solution (yet) for the average Joe to use. It requires a server on which to run the backup server (which could be a Mac), and some setup, and use of Terminal.app, etc. But it does solve many of the issues with TM.
Thanks,
Per