It is so deficient as a backup that I don't think it qualifies to be called a backup. That was my point. Backups are expected to protect against data loss for

It is so deficient as a backup that I don't think it qualifies to be called a backup. That was my point. Backups are expected to protect against data loss for a number of different failure cases (eg. disk failure, hardware fault leading to slow filesystem corruption, fire/theft, failed upgrade, "undo" for accidental change or deletion). There is a point where something addresses so few of these failure cases that you can't reasonably call it a backup.