How to use an older full backup set as a baseline

[DSAI]

Hi,

I was wondering if its possible for BE2012 to use an older full backup set to run incrementals or differentials against. (maybe there is a way to delete the entry in the BEDB for the last full backup)

we do full backups monthly, weekly differentials and daily incrementals.

Our last full backup failed and from what I have been told, a timestamp is still entered into the BEDB for that backup definition so I believe our next differential will use the failed full backup as the baseline.

Anyway to get around this situation aside from doing the full backup again.

thanks in advance

[pkh · Accepted solution]

When your full backup failed, you should rerun the full backup to get a good baseline.

[DSAI]

Ideally we would do that but we don't have sufficient window to repeat a full backup.

thats why we are looking for a workaround.

[pkh]

There is no way around this.  You just have to have a good full backup as a baseline before proceeding with your incremental/differential backups.

[Donald_Eady]

Unfortunately DSAI PKH is correct in his answer. You will most definitely need to run a full backup or your following differential or incremental backup jobs will fail as well. Additionally it recomended that you run your full more frequently than once a month "Weekly is best practice" with incremental or differental between fulls. Lastly you should not be able to mix your incremental and differential backups within the same job B.E. should not allow you to do this unless were talking about a SQL log "Incremental" backup.  

[DSAI]

Thanks pkh / Donald,

Thanks for pointing out that you cant use full, differential and incremental. I was getting confused with how we did things with 2010 and using the archive bit.

Regarding our backup strategy...we are still refining it...but in essence we are using BE2012 for both Archiving/Version control as well as DR so doing full weekly backups with no rotation would use alot of tapes, disk space and could be a problem as far as backup windows are concerned.

All the same, I do agree that weekly fulls is the best practice.