On Mon, 15 Jun 2015, Nick Holland wrote:
On 06/15/15 12:54, Liviu Daia wrote:The other downside, if you use the --link-dest option, is that there's always only one copy of each file. A few days ago there was a post on SO by somebody who used that system, and found out that his backup disk had bad sectors in the middle of some large files. He wasn't amused.This has nothing to do with --link-dest, really. If your disk has bad spots, you will hope it was only one large file...usually, it's the whole disk you can't read. For any disk-to-disk system -- rsync, dump/restore, etc, you need some kind of "more than one copy, more than one place" solution, too. Disk-to-Disk doesn't change the rules of backups: multiple copies, off-site, etc. I kinda hoped that was understood, but that was probably my error.
Moreover, that risk isn't related to --link-dest, it's a downside of any incremental backup system. Except when the backup medium itself is already redundant. An incremental backup solution was what the OP asked for.
Regards, David
