Does Toucan currently support Incremental Backups or SVN/Wiki-style backups with Diffs from file creation, including deletion restore? If so, where should I look to find that option?
If it is unavailable in Toucan, can you recommend any other software that does have it?
(Sorry if this has been answered before; I'm finding the support forum difficult to navigate, and search doesn't let me order results by date.)
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think the current Incremental Backup option should do what you want, if you have any problems or specific questions please let me know.
Forgive me if I'm just apparently blind, but I'm not finding an Incremental Backup option anywhere. Is it under the main "Sync" or "Backup" tabs or is it only accessible via a script?
I'm using version 3.0.4 on Windows if that's the issue.
sorry, my answer wasn't quite correct. Toucan has a Differential mode for backups, i.e. it backs up only changes from the initial backup. It doesn't have an Incremental option. I am afraid I can't make any recommendations as it isn't a feature I use!
Just wondering why you chose to code a differential backup and not an incremental?
Differential backups take longer and require more storage space. The only advantage is easier restoration. Nice to give users the choice?
If I may speculate, it's not just easier restoration but also more redundancy (thus, fewer points of failure) and less computation time on backup to check whether and how a file needs to be updated (at the cost of more time actually writing to the backup drive).
But yes, the main reason I want Incremental Backup is that my backup drive is only so many orders of magnitude larger than my use-drive and I've been running out of space even with Windows Backup, which people have claimed is incremental but certainly hasn't acted that way for me.
Differential is a good way to quickly update a full backup, but I don't think it's the best solution for retaining change history.
I spent a fair amount of time over the past few months looking at backup solutions, freeware and payware, but I found myself overwhelmed. I gave up and recently started using rdiff-backup. It does reverse incremental backups and it uses file deltas to do it.
It's not without its shortcomings - command line only, doesn't compress backups, doesn't encrypt backups, - but for me the shortcomings are tolerable. I can find my way around a command line. The bulk of my data is incompressible so lack of compression doesn't cost me much. I backup to a TrueCrypt device so encryption is covered. I don't know if it's the best solution (probably not) but it's good enough for me and it's free.
... hope that's helpful; offered for what it is worth.