Feature proposal: backup classes

[Ed W]

Martin Atkins wrote:
>
> What is the use-case for this?
>
> In my (admittedly limited) experience, classes of backups have been 
> used either where there is a variety of backup media with different 
> characteristics available, or where different datasets are being 
> backed up to the same target.
>
> I'm having trouble imagining why you'd want to distingish "classes" of 
> backup from the same source to the same medium.

Well, anytime you have

- a bunch of files which change through time
- new files are considered more important than old files
- you don't have unlimited storage

The idea is that you might want to keep (say) 10 min apart incremental 
backups for the first week, but after that it's only useful to keep a 
single file per week and from the month end onwards it might only useful 
to keep intermittent copies, say monthly

This structure is quite common with rsync style backups, eg snapback2 
keeps a fixed number of hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups.

I do agree that this is a good structure which works for quite a few 
situations to keep storage requirements reasonable

Ed W