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FAQ: Why Not Just Use Tape Backups?
The question is e.g. from a thread in comp.software.config-mgmt. It seems simple, but making it practical would bring up gotchas, the solution of which will lead to designing an SCM system.- Bringing back yesterday tapes would be easy if you could throw away what else has been done since.
- Since you cannot, you have to compare the two configurations, understand the dependencies. This is not trivial and won't scale well.
- With backup there is only one dimension: time. It means synchronously forcing all the developers to the same situation, forcing everyone to cope with everything (the very common /main/LATEST syndrome)
- Was yesterday situation consistent? Was the bug you found today surely not there already? What brought it in, in fact?
- If you intend to restore only certain files, which ones build up a consistent configuration?
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