I'm trying to figure out how to to the following:

Our backups run to a DVD system. We do one full per month, with daily differentials. The full is stored in /backups/currentfull/.
The diffs are stored in /diffs/dd-mm-yy, meaning TODAY's diffs will reside in 07-22-05.

The problem this causes is that when a complete folder needs restoring, I have to manually go to the full, copy it out, and then go through each differential and copy out the more current files.

I'd like to automate this process. The biggest obstacle I see is that occasionally I have to RESTORE, SAY, half a month instead of a whole month, or the changes to files make over the course of two weeks for example.

Any ideas how to accomplish this? I don't know of any kind of count FUNCTION for dates or anything like that. All help is appreciated.

MarkI don't know much about Linux but backups are the same on any OS.

Full backup - backup all files; reset archive bit

Incremental Backup - backup changed files; reset archive bit

Differential Backup - backup changed files; do not reset archive bit.

If you are doing differential backups you would only need to restore the last full backup and the backup taken on the date you wish to restore BACK to. DOS has the XCOPY utility that does this very nicely. You may have something similar to this in Linux.

Check out: http://www.linux-mag.com/1999-07/guru_01.html for some ideas.

Hope this helps.