Differential depnedent on Incremental?

[schraids]

Hello all, I'm very new to BE, and just recently installed BE2014 to test as a backup solution for my company.  I have setup the following schedule, but seem to be having problems with my differential backups being dependent on my incrementals. 

Full backup every 6 months, keep 1 year > Daily Incremental, keep 5 weeks > Monthly Differential, keep 27 weeks.

The problem I'm seeing after the monthly differential was created is that the incrementals before it are not able to expire, because the differential is dependent on them.  It was my understanding that a differential was "All data that has changed since the last Full Backup" so why is it saying its dependent on the incremental backups before it.  Am I doing something wrong?  Does my schedule make no sense at all?  Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

[lmosla · Accepted solution]

Hello schraids, 

The differential backups include all files that have changed since the last full or incremental backup. Take a look at http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO98909   You should refine the backup schedule, if you can , to run full backups more often.  For a more robust protection strategy typically full backups are ran more often than every 6 months. 

[schraids]

Hmm, so my schedule will need completely reworked...  I am coming from Asigra DS-User which is the only backup solution I have used, and the retention schedule setup is quite different.  I have it set to

-keep the latest 1 generation

-keep 1 generation every 1 day for 1 week

-keep 1 generation every 1 week for 1 month

-keep 1 generation every 1 month for 1 year

-keep 1 generation every 1 year for 3 years.

Basically this allows me to go back to a specific day for 1 week, a specific week for 1 month, a specific month for 1 year, and a specific year for 3 years, and it only backs up a file if it has changed from the previous generation.  What kind of equivalent schedule can be setup in BE without using full backups each time?  I have about 4 TB of total data, if I'm keeping full backups for each week of the current month, and month of the current year, that’s going to be 16 full backups of all my servers.  All but 3 have very small regular changes to the file system, so this doesn’t seem like the best use of our resources.  Is there an option to not backup duplicate files that have already been backed up?  I have about 15TB of space on my offsite backup server.

[pkh]

If your files do not change often, then you should take a look at the Archive option. This allows you to archive infrequently used files and you can just backup the archive periodically