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Have a weekly summary of file changes since last month (Friday weekly differential backup).
Have a monthly full backup of your files.
Moreover, assume that you want to retain access to all backups, including the daily ones, for at least
six months.
The following GFS scheme suits such purposes:
Start backup at:
11:30 PM
Back up on:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday
Weekly/monthly:
Friday
Keep backups:
Daily:
6 months
Weekly:
6 months
Monthly:
5 years
Here, daily incremental backups will be created on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with weekly and
monthly backups performed on Fridays. Note that, in order to choose
Friday
in the
Weekly/monthly
field, you need to first select it in the
Back up on
field.
Such an archive would allow you to compare your financial documents as of the first and the last day
of work, and have a five-year history of all documents, etc.
No daily backups
Consider a more exotic GFS scheme:
Start backup at:
12:00 PM
Back up on:
Friday
Weekly/monthly:
Friday
Keep backups:
Daily:
1 week
Weekly:
1 month
Monthly:
indefinitely
Backup is thus performed only on Fridays. This makes Friday the only choice for weekly and monthly
backups, leaving no other date for daily backups. The resulting “Grandfather-Father” archive will
hence consist only of weekly differential and monthly full backups.
Even though it is possible to use GFS to create such an archive, the Custom scheme is more flexible in
this situation.
6.2.10.5
Tower of Hanoi scheme
At a glance
Up to 16 levels of full, differential, and incremental backups
Next-level backups are twice as rare as previous-level backups
One backup of each level is stored at a time
Higher density of more recent backups