[Discuss] rsnapshot vs. rdiff-backup

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: Derek Atkins [mailto:warlord at MIT.EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2013 2:11 PM
> To: Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
> Cc: John Abreau; Jerry Feldman; BLU Discuss
> Subject: Re: [Discuss] rsnapshot vs. rdiff-backup
> 
> "Edward Ned Harvey (blu)" <blu at nedharvey.com> writes:
> 
> > With my configuration, I get snapshot dates as follows:
> >
> > Nov  2 01:00 weekly.3/
> > Nov  9 01:00 weekly.2/
> > Nov 16 01:00 weekly.1/
> > Nov 23 01:00 weekly.0/
> 
> Why is your weekly.0 more than a week out of date?  I would've expected,
> based on the numbers, that your weekly.0 would be on Nov 30th.

That's right.  Once an hour, my system creates a new hourly.  But *all* the hourlies are later than the latest daily.  Once a night, it takes the oldest hourly, and renames it "daily.0" instead of deleting it.  And it renames all the dailies += 1.  But *all* the dailies are later than the latest weekly.  Once a week, it takes the oldest daily, and renames it "weekly.0" instead of deleting it.

While I acknowledge this might not be super intuitive, it is programatically very easy, (which is the reason they do it) and it works to effectively create finer granularity in recent times, and coarser granularity in progressively older times.  At any given time, my latest weekly will be 1-2 weeks old, no more and no less.  (I could be wrong, it might be 8-15 days old because of my latest hourlies) ... 

I was responding to Jerry saying "the most recent weekly was several weeks old" which would not occur for most people, using something of a standard configuration.