Good question. Hmm. I said that without really thinking about it, but on reflection I think the idea of "proper" backups that I had in mind involves them being done with the deliberate intention, rather than merely the happy side effect, of protecting against data loss. In the ad-hoc phase I describe, I'd often have copies of code on more than one machine simply because sometimes it was more convenient for me to work on it on one machine and sometimes on another, so I'd copy it back and forth as necessary for that purpose – and if I didn't happen to use a particular machine for a while, then it wouldn't acquire an up-to-date copy for a while. Also, the code which got replicated was the code I happened to feel like working on at the time, rather than the code which would cost most time to rewrite if it was lost; if I'd been doing the copying with data loss in mind, I'd have preferentially copied the most valuable rather than the most active data.
Incrementality isn't a feature that defines proper backups, for me. It's handy for protection against some kinds of data loss (deleting or destructively modifying a file in error and not noticing until after the next backup run), but I wouldn't say that a backup solution which ignored this risk to focus solely on disk crashes and machine theft was fundamentally unworthy of the name. Just depends on what you see your risk model as.
The SVN repository is only for my source code. I also (these days) have lots of irreplaceable data which isn't source code.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 04:15 pm (UTC)Incrementality isn't a feature that defines proper backups, for me. It's handy for protection against some kinds of data loss (deleting or destructively modifying a file in error and not noticing until after the next backup run), but I wouldn't say that a backup solution which ignored this risk to focus solely on disk crashes and machine theft was fundamentally unworthy of the name. Just depends on what you see your risk model as.
The SVN repository is only for my source code. I also (these days) have lots of irreplaceable data which isn't source code.