🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mike_steiner-131192132315@192.35.50.131> mike_steiner@qm.claris.com (Mike Steiner) writes:
>In article <10NOV199219055353@jetson.uh.edu>, hcls7@jetson.uh.edu (Marino,
>Nancy F.) wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 	The Norton Backup only appends changes made in files. In no time, you
>> can accumulate scads of back-up disks. Since I like Norton Utilities in
>> general, I have decided to get around this problem by making a complete, fresh
>> back-up each time. This is, of course, time-consuming, and may not be
>> desireable if you have a lot to back up.
>> 	Maybe Nprton will improve this in a future version.
>
>Almost every backup program handles incremental backups this way.  The
>reason is that if something happens during the backup, the previous
>versions are left untouched.

That's not the main reason.  It's fairly simple to verify a new copy of the  
file before deleting the old copy (and, of course, the original is still 
there to copy again if necessary).  The reason the old copies aren't
deleted is simply so you can go back to them.  In other words, backups are
often used as archives.  It's nice to know that you can free up some space   
on your hard drive by deleting some files and have the ability to recover 
those files from the backup if necessary.  With an image backup, the files
you deleted will be deleted from the backup the next time you do one, so  
you can actually *lose* data by doing a backup. Also, if a file has been
corrupted prior to the most recent backup, the corrupted file will replace the
good one in an image backup, and you won't be able to recover it.  The 
only solution with an image backup is to maintain multiple backup sets, 
but you'd have to do a full backup every time, without ever re-using any
disks, to ensure that you can recover any version of any file.

Of course, with any type of backup, one should do a full backup on a new
set of disks from time to time, to provide some redundancy in case the
backup itself becomes corrupted.
  
--
Steve Kanefsky