Re: Questions on include/exclude, and others.

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Hi,

On 08/29/10 13:04, Fudi Lu wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. I have one more question:
> Is --fsck enough of an verification that my backup data is in a
> consistent, uncorrupted, no-error, restorable state? Is it reasonable to
> periodically run fsck to do some checking? A problem with many backup
> schemes is that one doesn't know whether their backup is good until they
> really need it. S3 disk seems nigh infallible, but perhaps some other
> parts of the backup system can fail.

When you run --fsck it will confirm that all the blocks required by
archives exist; but not that they are uncorrupted.  To verify that
all the blocks were uncorrupted would require downloading all your
data, since they can only be cryptographically verified by the client
with access to your keys.

> Just pure curiosity, I suppose deduplication is machine-wide instead of
> account-wide right?

Correct.  You really don't want one machine to gain information about what data
is stored on other machines anyway.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid