Daily Differential, but Daily Full on one folder..?

[thatguyLex]

Hey there --   I'm wondering if this is somehow possible, or at least what would people suggest for a decent solution:

The tech support for a database app suggests that we do a full back up of the data files every night, but other than that, I'd just like to continue doing our weekly full and daily differential backups.  Is there any way to tell BackupExec to do a full backup on one folder, but otherwise, differential?

Thoughts? Thanks

[CraigV]

Hi,

Which version of BE? If BE 2010 R3 for instance, you would look at using a policy (either GFS or not). In your policy setup you'd be given the opportunity to select a target...in this case you'd have 2. 1 holding the FULL backups, and the other holding the DIFF (must be defined as B2Ds first!).

You'd be able to select these folders accordingly.

Thanks!

[pkh · Accepted solution]

 Is there any way to tell BackupExec to do a full backup on one folder, but otherwise, differential?

No.  You cannot do this with one job.  You need two jobs; one job for the particular folder and another job for the rest of the folders.

[Colin_Weaver]

Not sure why someone gave pkh a negative mark for this as he is correct - you must use separate jobs if you want one folder to be a full with the rest of the data on the server as a differential.

EDIT: For the OP,  if that database is sitting in SQL or SQL Express then you should probably be looking at SQL Agent backups and not file system ones anyway - you have not given us enough info about the "database app" to really advise on this.

[thatguyLex]

Thanks for the replies.  

To be honest,  I'm not entirely convinced that the app tech support people are correct.  It's a Sybase backend, and even their help files say differential ("incremental_since_full") would be fine.  But the tech support is adamant that it should be a full backup of the app's data directory every night.

To appease them, and based on these replies, I'll do a full backup-to-disk of the data dir, followed by a differential backup to tape (skipping the data dir in the differential).

Thanks again!