[BackupPC-users] How to delete backups? + Benefit of incremental backups?

[Thomas B. <tb...@os...>]

Hello,

we are using BackupPC and it works perfect on different places.
But we have 2 questions on it:

1. We wonder why neither the GUI nor the commands offer a possibility to 
delete backups (full and incremental). If e.g. the backup partition is filled 
up, this would be very helpful.

As far as we understood the concept of using hardlinks and different 
directories for each backup + a hash pool for each file it seems to be very 
easy to delete a backup NN.

Just delete recursively the backup directory NN and the nightly run will 
really destroy all orphaned files with a hardlink count of 1.

If a full backup is deleted that way, incremental backups depending on it then 
depend on the next earlyer full backup and work as before. Same is true for 
incremental backups. So the GUI works as before and the creation of new 
backups too.

Is that idea correct?

2. What is real benefit of incremental backups compared to full backups?

In both cases only changed/new files use disk space according to the hardlink 
concept of BackupPC.

We have also detected, that in some cases incremental backups need much more 
time than full backups (factor 3-5) This sounds odd to us.

Thanx
Thomas Birnthaler
-- 
OSTC Open Source Training and Consulting GmbH / HRB Nuernberg 20032
tel +49 911-3474544 / fax +49 911-1806277 / http://www.ostc.de
Delsenbachweg 32 / D-90425 Nuernberg / Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Thomas Birnthaler / +49 171-3047465 / tb...@os... / pgp 0xFEE7EB4C
Hermann Gottschalk / +49 173-3600680 / hg...@os... / pgp 0x0B2D8EEA