Does SyncBackPro v6 support using NTFS hard links for space efficient backups? By that I mean the following:
- I'd like to keep 30 nightly backups in a space efficient way, I do not want 30 copies of files that do not change over the course of 30 days, only copies of files that do change over the 30 days
- There needs to be a very efficient way to consolidate or drop backups older than 30 days
The solution I'm thinking of:
- Beginning of time: take a full backup by copying all source files to a destination directory
- Next night:
- new destination directory
- for all unchanged files from the previous backup, just make a hard link in the dest directory that points to the files in the previous backup directory
- copy over only new or updated files
- Cleanup: if the oldest backup needs to be deleted, simply delete the oldest backup directory (because of the hard links in the newer backup directories, some of the files are not going to be deleted if they are still referenced by newer backups)
This can also be enhanced to keep weekly, monthly, yearly backups.
Is there a way to do this or something similar with SyncBackPro v6 (or the upcoming v7)? Key here is minimal use of space on the backup disk, while being able to bulk restore to a specific "snapshot". I know SyncBack supports versioning but it's not quite the same thing as a "snapshot" because I cannot easily tell what version belonged to a certain snapshot and I cannot easily bulk restore such a snapshot, there's a lot of manual work involved.
- I'd like to keep 30 nightly backups in a space efficient way, I do not want 30 copies of files that do not change over the course of 30 days, only copies of files that do change over the 30 days
- There needs to be a very efficient way to consolidate or drop backups older than 30 days
The solution I'm thinking of:
- Beginning of time: take a full backup by copying all source files to a destination directory
- Next night:
- new destination directory
- for all unchanged files from the previous backup, just make a hard link in the dest directory that points to the files in the previous backup directory
- copy over only new or updated files
- Cleanup: if the oldest backup needs to be deleted, simply delete the oldest backup directory (because of the hard links in the newer backup directories, some of the files are not going to be deleted if they are still referenced by newer backups)
This can also be enhanced to keep weekly, monthly, yearly backups.
Is there a way to do this or something similar with SyncBackPro v6 (or the upcoming v7)? Key here is minimal use of space on the backup disk, while being able to bulk restore to a specific "snapshot". I know SyncBack supports versioning but it's not quite the same thing as a "snapshot" because I cannot easily tell what version belonged to a certain snapshot and I cannot easily bulk restore such a snapshot, there's a lot of manual work involved.