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Andrew__Thompso's avatar
Andrew__Thompso
Level 4
8 years ago

Incremental backups not appending to full backup

Im using BE2010R3 to backup some remote servers to B2D

There is about 2TB of data that grows by about 3GB every day.

I have done a 1 off full backup of the whole 2TB in 1 job and its created a 2TB bkf file

Then created a new recurring job to daily backup any changes and append to the original backup set. (using incremental using archive bit - reset)

However when the first incremental job runs it creates a new bkf file rather than appending to the already exisitng 2TB bkf file

Then on the 2nd run of the incremental job it completely overwrites the 2TB bkf and creates a bkf file with just the incremental changes from the night before. So all i end up with is the last 2 nights incremental changes and not the original full backup data anymore

The incremental job is set up to append to media and terminate if none available.

I just want to be able to create 1 full backup and then append to it every day for the rest of the jobs life - the setup above should achieve this i thought?

Anybody know where its going wrong please and how i can resolve?

Thanks

2010 all revisions
Windows Server 2008

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  • Colin_Weaver's avatar
    Colin_Weaver
    Moderator
    8 years ago

    Firstly the overwrite protection on your Full backup is not long enough (or you have media protetion set to none) so you need to fix that (or upgrade to a newer version of Backup Exec as newer versions block the deletion of on disk disk based backup sets if they relate to incremental chains where the complete chain is not expired)

    Secondly best practice (for older BE versions) is to not use appends with backup-to-disk and always start disk jobs in a way that will create new BKF files (so start as Overwrite and it will either delete and recreate an existing one or create a new one) Note: we decided this best practice was so important due to how a sequence of ongoing appends affects media families and catalog operations that newer versions of Backup Exec do not append to BKF files ever, it is one set per bkf (and a set is something like a drive letter or a system state, meaning a complete server backup is usually more than one set)

    • Andrew__Thompso's avatar
      Andrew__Thompso
      Level 4
      8 years ago

      Hi Colin,

      Thankyou for a speedy reply....

      So will this scenario work as per your explanation above?

      One off Full Backup Job - overwrite protection until 31/12/2099

      Create a new Job for the incremental changes each night but set that job to also Overwrite, not append?

      The data is all a mixture of word, pdf and xml files only. Nothing else bar these 3 file formats.

      Just to confirm the full backup will only be ever run once and then its just the appended data backed up each day until the job becomes redunadant somewhere down the line.

      Thankyou

      • Colin_Weaver's avatar
        Colin_Weaver
        Moderator
        8 years ago

        Hmm not a good idea - in fact very bad

         

        If you try for an incremental forverer strategy and one of more of the backup sets is lost or gets corrupted, any complete disaster will be very limited limited (and complicated) depending on which parts of the chain were lost - with the worse case scenario of being impossible to recover the system at all. You should be running regular full backups and have enough storage to be able to at least maintain a GFS strategy against a full backup.

        Also if you try for an incremental forever strategy and have all your backup sets but (as an example) it is 300 days of backups and then you need to recover from a server disaster, your restore to the state at the time of the most recent incremental could take days to achieve as the backup admin  would have to create 300 restore jobs (more or less one at a time)

        You could possibly look at synthetic backups - but as BE 2010 R3 is no longer supported, if you don't already own the correct licenses for this option then you can't use it and even if you have the correct licenses this still need enough storage for at leats 2 full backups and a weeks worth of incrementals