Re: Many Archives, Or One?

[Gabriel Kerneis <gabriel@kerneis.info>]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 06:05:34AM +0000, d8038my+ui1ofg@guerrillamail.com wrote:
> I have about a dozen separate directories I would like to backup with Tarsnap.
> I could create one archive per directory, or one big archive with all the
> directories in it. Is there any reason to prefer one method over the other? It
> doesn't seem like either method would impact the difficulty of restoring a
> particular file. Would creating multiple archives use more bandwidth?

What it would change, however, is your ability to delete one particular archive:
if you happen to have some large files (sometimes mistakenly) backed-up in one
of your directories that eat up a lot of space, you might want to delete the
related archive to avoid paying for it after some time.  Deletion is an
all-or-nothing deal: you cannot delete only some files in a given archive.
Having several of them gives you a finer-grained control on how long to keep
each directory.  (Note also that deduplication could make this point irrelevant.
YMMV.)

Best,
-- 
Gabriel