backup

[Karl Kuehn]

On Oct 30, 2007, at 11:42 PM, Hex Star wrote:

>> Except it sounds like they are doing block rather than file-level  
>> backup.
>> There are a lot of products in this space, and it would be good to  
>> have one
>> that fully supported MacOS X. There are a number that work on  
>> linux, and so
>> have been ported over, but they suffer a little in translation.
>
> Ah well in that case although it doesn't have all the fancy backup
> management and restoration features this software that has been
> pointed out has dd IMO is still a good stable utility for doing image
> based backups and restoring them.


	Well... but that would be missing the point of this system. It does  
not just do a linear copy of all of the blocks every time, but  
compares them, and only takes the blocks that have changed. This can  
work out very well in cases like virtual machines or Photoshop files  
where only part of a large file may have changed. TimeMachine has to  
copy the entire file, where this system could only copy the smaller  
portion of a file that actually changed.

	dd on the other hand has none of the features, and even worse case of  
having to copy everything every time.

--
	Karl Kuehn
		larkost at softhome.net