Archive Management

Hello,

I have an idea for managing backup archives in a very space efficient and 
power-full way.   I have looked through the features of dar and it looks to 
me like the development version should support what I envision.  I will try 
to explain with an example.

The archives would be stored and managed on a dedicated server with redundant 
storage to protect against loss.

Day 1: Full backup
Day 2: Incremental referencing day 1
Day 3: Incremental referencing day 2
Day N: Incremental referencing day n-1

For each one of these archives I will define how long I want to keep it (by 
some means of my own).  I may keep the weekly backup longer then the daily 
for instance.

When a backup has expired and I no longer need it, I want to merge it with the 
upstream incremental.  This way I can reclaim the space taken by files in the 
expired archive that are no longer needed by upstream incrementals. 

shouldn't I be able to do this with the -+ and -/ options in the development 
version?  Ie if I want to merge day2 into day3

dar -+ merge_day2_day3 -A day3 -@ day2 -/ A

In this way you could have what I would call a rolling backup that is space 
efficient and very flexible.  It also eliminates the need to do a full backup 
on a periodic basis.  Every day you only need to do a incremental from the 
previous day.  This will also help when you have a large about of data that 
you need to keep a backup of off site.  The smaller backup sizes can be 
transferred over a low bandwidth connection to a server that would store and 
manage all the backup archives.  I would also keep a copy on a local server 
for faster restores.

What are your thoughts on this?

-- 
Regards

Joseph Watson

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