Here’s the problem with having a backup strategy that takes 3 months: Your Linksys wireless router has an uptime < 3 months, and when it reboots, you lose your connection to the backup server, so you have to restart the backup process.
Additionally, you don’t actually realize that the initial backup that had been running for the last 3 months wasn’t quite right (the owner & permissions were wrong on the backed up files). So, although you thought you’d be able to do delta incremental backups, that first try doesn’t count. So, you pretty much have to back up the whole thing again.
Oh, and since you got kinda screwed by using up 90% of your DSL line’s bandwidth, you throttle this one more aggressively, which means it’s going to take even more time to complete. Oh well!
Three months is an awful lot of time during which nothing can go wrong.
Yeah, the thought was that one could do partial backups, and that even if a backup was aborted, that you would use the partial backup to continue from. There are several problem with this strategy that I could outline in another post.
Although, once it *does* complete, I suspect that incremental backups will actually work, and not take 3 months.