Bavkup servers over VPN/Public Lines

[Lou_Marino]

I am currently setup with a multiple location remote backup. These locations are connected using DSL and Cable modems over public lines. We have VPN setup at each location so they are on our network.
We have been running Full backups of User Home Folders every other month and differential in between. Is this the best and fastest way to run these backups?
I have been looking into running a Full/Mod time every day, but am not sure if this is a safe way to backup user directories.
Any ideas? Any opinions?

[Renuka_-]

Hello,
If you are running differential backups you need to restore the last full and the last differntial.
The kind of backups and their frequency will depend on the amount of data to be backed up and the level of activity on these files.
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[Lou_Marino]

I am still wondering what would be the fastest and most efficient way of backing up remote locations. Differential seems to be a pain because there needs to be Full backups run periodically. What seems to be the “popular” solution?

[Robert_Fleming]

I would use a incremental back up.....it will take up more disk space but it will defiantly run faster across a dsl/cable grade VPN circuit

I am currently running a incremental back up schema via VPN for 16 laptop users, and it works quite well.....
I am using a 500Gb SATA array, so disk space is not a problem.....But what i have noticed is that once i preformed a full back up, the load on my network was dramatical lighter with the incremental back up's.

[Lou_Marino]

Do you need to run any Full backups every now and then, or are you just running incremental?

[Robert_Fleming]

Our schema runs a full back up every 14 days, and then goes back to incemental... each user is limited to 3gb of disk space, so the over head is not too bad.... we purge the old back ups that are 45 days old, this limits the server side overhead to to about 20gb per user with archived back ups, and since the users are all remote users on dsl & cable we have throttled the full backup to 125/Ksec, and by staggering the date of full back up for the users the total load to the network is at a minimum.
We are in the process of moving to the DLO agent for all of our remote users, this should lessen the overhead even more!!