How to keep multiple source folders consistent

General
1

Hi there! I’m new to kopia but excited to dive in more deeply. I’m asking here for some advice.

Context:
I want to backup the data of a few applications which depend on each other in the way that if some data changes in one application, there are related changes in all other applications as well. Kopia can’t combine multiple data folder in a single snapshot. Therefore I get a snapshot for every applications data folder. This means multiple snapshots with a similar timestamp because the snapshots has been created almost at the same time. Let’s call that: snapshots which belong to each other. According to the ‘keep’ policy, kopia will keep some snapshots, others are going to be deleted over time. After some time only a few snapshots are left for every year.

Question:
How can I make sure that the few kept snapshots are consistent in the sense that they have all a similar timestamp and still ‘belong to each other’? I’m afraid of ending up with a annual-2 snapshot for application A which is not related to the annual-2 snapshot of application B anymore.

Best regards and thanks a lot
Martin

2

It isn’t true.

You can simply take snapshot from the root of the drive and eliminate unneeded folders in .kopiaignore file, so you will end up with a single snapshot per computer/drive.

3

Thanks for your suggestion iBackup. But what if the application A and B (as in my example) aren’t on the same drive?

4

I even can’t imagine about such design where “few applications which depend on each other in the way that if some data changes in one application, there are related changes in all other applications as well” that will be sparse across different drives. Either those apps unrelated or it probably a bad design, hard to tell without knowing that apps. Usually such applications if they are really related should have its own backup/snapshot solution.

If you looking for an atomic snapshot in time, then before running backup software, you have to take atomic snapshot provided by file systems, VSS on windows, or ZFS, BTRFS, LVM snapshots and backup those FS snapshots instead.

Anyway, regardless apps relations, kopia will keep backups according to your policies.
One can benefit from deduplication by keeping backups in a single repository not only from different drives, but even from multiple computers.