[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“In practice, you can expect to need a backup drive
approximately twice the size of the system you are backing up. Once
fully established, the backup system will not continue to grow,
because old data will eventually be retired and deleted
automatically.“With the configuration options in rsnapshot it will be possible
to create just about any tiered backup arrangement you want. For my
system, I keep daily snapshots for 30 days, weeklies for just over
a year, and finally, monthly backups for ten years. Presumably, I
will have set up a new system long before any of the monthlies get
deleted.“Using a script, I have set up my system to work like the
Wayback Machine in that each backup incorporates the date in its
file path. So, I can browse the available dates and pick one I
think is most likely to have the data I want. Thus if today is
August 20, 2009, and I’ve accidently deleted my Mozilla
bookmarks file (I’ve known Sea Monkey to destroy this file if
it crashes badly), I can recover it by copying from
yesterday’s backup:”