Incremental Backup

Origin

For this project I had a lot of times I thought about it. Windows incremental backup, GitHub, my friends, but overall it was me who was going to use it so that is the real origin. I like to have a lot and I mean A LOT of data. I back up my phone every month and when I do that I zip up the full backup and put that in another location. This gets big over time as 5 GB every month is 60 GB a year not including all the other full backups I do of projects. I would backup everything on the cloud, like why not, I have space. Well at one point I just had so much space going to this I figured it was about time to change that.

Initial Thoughts

So most people get confused when this is a title, like what, why, huh, what. Let me just answer that you lose nothing by doing it as the lost space in almost all cases is > .1%, saying that I typically get 20% - 40% gain.

Breaking Down options

So we are given 2 options, compress and decompress. I will start by talking about compression.

When you have files you can do 4 things which are, create, delete, rename, and modify. Let me map it out easily as the function happening and the result. We are going to assume they are in a folder with each version. (NOTE: The stats file is a record of what happens) 1. Create - Do nothing to file, write nothing to stats 2. Delete - Delete file, Write last version path of the file to stats 3. Rename - Delete file, write last version path of the file and that file to stats 4. Modify - Do nothing to file, Write nothing to stats