I have, back in the day.. both floppy-controller and IDE based... with a whopping range of storage from 220 MiB to 4 GiB. Since I don't have enough karma to wr

I have, back in the day.. both floppy-controller and IDE based... with a whopping range of storage from 220 MiB to 4 GiB. Since I don't have enough karma to write another comment anonymously: Restoring from backups is a last resort for very important files deleted more than a few days ago (beyond what hourly/daily snapshots contain) or for business continuity (BCP) / disaster recovery (DR) of an entire system that cannot be recovered via automated configuration management rebuild. Snapshots to nearline storage reduce RTO for most common use-cases, and most users and systems don't generate much churn of data in a day. For recovery of important files, sending a courier out to retrieve a backup tape set from the vaulting provider implies the RTO would accept in a matter of several hours. An RTO of under an hour would imply backups would need to be stored on nearline media (commodity spinning rust) or at a backup cloud vendor like AWS Glacier or Tarsnap, which is more expensive than tape. The deciding factor of how much to rationally spend on DR/BCP solutions follows from a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to quantify the loss of a service over a certain time, which drives RTO and RPO goals. (A common factoid of DR/BCP is "about half of businesses who lose their data go out of business within six months.") RTO - Recovery Time Objective - desire/need to recover within a certain time window RPO - Recovery Point Objective - how close to the original is the recovery