The best way to restore?

[valley_girl1919]

Hi! We are using back up exec where I work. I am new with back up exec and have some questions. First let me explain how we use back up exec; we do a full backup disk to disk on Sundays, weekly, and from Monday through out the week, nightly we do incremental backups. I have not had to restore a file or folder yet and want to start doing a weekly test restore to make sure the backups are working correctly. So my main question is say if I want to restore a file/folder since the last full backup, will I have to restore from the full backup of the file and then the incrementals? Or say if on Wednesday I can't open a file cause it's corrupt, but I know Monday I was able to open it can I just restore from Mondays incremental backup?

[pkh · Accepted solution]

If you want to restore a single file, then you can just restore from the latest incremental backup that contains the file, but if you want to restore an entire folder, you need to restore the last full backup and ALL the subsequent incremental backup in the order that they are taken.

[Colin_Weaver]

If you run BE 2012 instead of any of the older versions, then the restore view from the incremental date will show all of the files  as if you had performed a full. Then when you submit the job Backup Exec finds the media it needs for all the fulls and incrementals in the background making your life easier (unless you ejected the media to a vault anyway)

However as your post seems to have field data stating you are using 10.x or earlier of BE then the answer PKH gave is correct in that you need to restore the full and then each incremental in order to get back an entire folder.