So What's your strategy?

[ineloquucius]

It occurs to me that without keeping a database of all files in a periodic backup rotation, and some ready scripts to ferret out the desired ones from among the archives, there’s a bit of a challenge to using a basic archiving program.

For instance, I want to return directory X to the state it was in on February 4th of this year. I then need to make sure that the last instance of EVERY file that was in that directory, on that day, right up to but not after the first archive immediately following that day, is restored. If your full backups are done, say, every 8 weeks or more, that may be quite a number of .zip’s to go through, ensuring that every file has been covered. Naturally, some balance between ease of restoration and space must be found. This can be a tricky balance to strike if your dailys are 1Gb +.

So What’s your backup strategy?

[TBGBe]

I have never had a requirement to be able to recreate a snap-shot of a specific day.
In my case I have a Full Backup (permanently stored) every two weeks and just have an overnight/daily backup (external hard disk) for Updated files. The daily backups are rotated (overwritten) every four weeks.

[spwolf]

if you select multiextract in correct order, you wont have to work much with daily backups, just select bunch of files and hit extract…

This is why most people do full backups weekly.