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Question regarding Incremental Backup

BEguy
Level 3

I have a situation here

. I was running a diffrential backup for one of my file servers since last 2 years. Now management decided to run Incremental backups. The total folder size is around 20 TB.Here are my questions

 

1. If I change my backup type to Incremental then the first backup will be a full backup?

2. What if I cancel the job suppose after backing up 8 TB of data. The next incremental will again be a full backup or it will backup the data after the point job was cancelled?.

 

I am not sure so wanted someone to help me out with this

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

BEguy
Level 3

I changed the Backup mode to Incremental and first backup ran as a Full backup.

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4 REPLIES 4

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

1) You will probably have to run a specific full backup to restart the sequence

2) If either incremental or differential jobs are interrupted for any reason, mid job, then it is best practice to run a new full to ensure that there are no inconsistencies between what was actually backed up and what may have been later in the job processing (but was still in the snapshot request that occurred near the start)

 

BTW we do not recommend running either incremental or differential backups forever, you should periodicaly run a new full (this is especially important for incremementals where the chain of sets would be huges) As such I hope you do usually run regilar full backups.

BEguy
Level 3

Thank You for your respone

The reason we are running only incremental monthly backup is that this are legal documents and we need legal documents for entire month in one backup. By running Incremental backup every month we make sure that only changes are backed up ( in this case 1 month of data ). Can you suggest a better starategy in this scenario. Thanks

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

An alternative would be to use the "Synthetic backup" feature which comes along with the Advance Disk Based Option - http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO23538

BEguy
Level 3

I changed the Backup mode to Incremental and first backup ran as a Full backup.