Currently I back up my personal files using a simple shell script that creates a tarball. It is being run by cron hourly.
I'm planning to switch to incremental backups (I will use duplicity), because this will minimize the data transfer over network.
This leads me to some general questions:
- when making incremental backups, what strategy to choose? As I understand, such a strategy implies creating a full backup, then some incremental backups. At some point, a full backup is made again and it starts a new set. My problem is I don't know how to decide how often I should make this full backup again. If I'm doing backups hourly, would it make sense to start the day with a full backup and do incremental ones later, or is there a better strategy?
- how many full sets of backups should I keep before starting to rotate them?