Re: File system recursion and symlinks: A never-ending story (and how to bring it to an end for me)

[coderman <coderman () gmail com>]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 6:16 PM, coderman <coderman () gmail com> wrote:
> ...
> there are also [lots of concerns and caveats with using volume snapshots ...]

someone asked, "then why use snapshots for backups if difficult?"

a backup is represented as a collection of data at a specific point in
time. your backup software will traverse the entire collection to
perform a complete or incremental archive of this collection.

you probably reference it by date, like 05/30/2011-18:50:30. if it
takes 45 minutes to traverse a filesystem for backup, what you expect
to be backup 05/30/2011-18:50:30 is really a set spanning
05/30/2011-18:50:30 to 05/30/2011-19:20:00 with potentially large
amounts of change spanning that time frame and no clue what they were.

with a snapshot of a volume at 05/30/2011-18:50:30, you know the
backup process performed on that snapshot is truly a backup of the
data as of 05/30/2011-18:50:30 no matter how long it takes to iterate
over / analyze the files within it.

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