[Borgbackup] Borg vs. full/incremental backup

[William Kenworthy]

On 7/4/21 11:11 pm, Zack Coffey wrote:
> Markus, to help with the routine maintenance of Borgbackup, I use
> borgmatic. Have been for a few years and it's quite nice.
> ...
> The old way of 'full/incremental' backups is a hold over of a long
> time ago. It's still used but there are better ways. 
> The more modern way (which is very similar) of 'initial/update' is a
> more fine tuned way. It's how we've been handling backups for over 15
> years. 
> We don't do occasional full backups, it's a waste of time and
> resources. The way Borgbackup handles this is a more modern and
> smarter approach.
>
>
I agree with this - there are smarter ways these days.  Last week I had
to recover a few terabytes from offline backup due to a poorly thought
out rm wildcard taking out most of the online borg repo as well as the
data it had backed up.

The online backups are ~20 repos for individual machines and data stores
on a moosefs cluster with a goal of 4 - fairly bulletproof except for
the finger trouble.

The offline is a ~daily manual borgbackup of the online backups to a
single repo on a 2Tb removable disk - there is a lot of duplication
across the individual repos giving a very good deduplication ratio that
allows a stupidly high amount of original data on the 2Tb disk.

Restoration was trouble free and didnt take an excessive amount of time
so I am happy with the level of protection and the appropriate safety of
the data.  Whilst the above incident has been the worst in awhile,
borgbackup has been very useful for me! Using traditional incrementals
and trying to work forward from the last full backup would have been a
lot more messy and time consuming with (in my experience) a higher
chance of failure.

BillK