backup question

[Shahin]

Hi,

I have question regarding the backups,

we have a full backup of a folder once a month then untill next month we have only differntila backup.

now a user has contact me that she has delete the content of a folder, I did resotre the full backup and the last differential backup.

but now users says Thank you this good but here are to many files in the folder and they did delete some files.

so question is how can we be sure that when we restore a backup then that is exacly as the customer before delet them?

if a user delete a file differential backup doesnoth backup the folder right?

[CraigV]

If you've restored too many files and the user deletes them before the next backup, then they're not backed up...but you'd end up restoring them again if you restored from the same tapes.

[Shahin]

Hi Craig,

Thank you for your reply,

maybe I did not explaine correctly, this is the setuation,

There is a folder that is at 19-06-2016 was fully backed up size 20.9 MB, then at 01-07-2016 I can see the diff job backedup the folder and its size is 1.37MB, then 05-07-2016 again the folder is empty.

Now customer says ja we did delete the contant of the this folder can you restore it, so becuse the folder is completly deleted and from what I know I should first restore the full backup of the 19-06-2016 and the last diferatial backup, but because the last diff backup of 06-07-2016 is empty I did only resotre only the full backup of the 19-06-2016. then customer says yes these are the files but there too much because they have deleted some files, so I did go thouw all the diff backup sets and find the backup set of 04-07-2016 with 1.37 MB file and resotre it on a different location for customer to see if these are the exact files but she says these files are part of deleted files.

So now I am confuse, how can we resore the folder to be correct.

when some one delete files of a folder does the diff job backup the folder again? or diff job only backup the folder when files add and it will backup the added or changed files?

Thanks

[LegAEI]

Honestly it sounds like a communication issue between what you can do and what your customer expects.

You were asked to restore all files in that directory as of a certain date, which you did. The differential backup will not delete files to restore the directory to a perfect state, it will only update files (write changes) changed since the last full backup. This means if you have 1000 files in the full backup, a user deletes 700 files and writes to 150 files, then you will NOT restore 300 files. You will instead restore 1000 files, 150 of which have current changes.

If you want a perfect restoration of the folder state at the time of the backup (including deleted files since last full backup) you will have to run a daily FULL backup, though you might also be able to use the "restore to a point in time" feature to restore the folder to it's state at a specific time. I've not found this to be 100% effective for your scenario in the past, but I'm sure other people on this board can verify.

Cheers!

[Shahin]

Hi LegAEI,

Thanks for your reply,

I thought so as well, it is almost impossible to keep each customer happy, i ask this becuse our CIO saying that, then customers must keep a list of files that they have deleted. Personaly I think this is the customer reponsiblty to not delete files and if someone has delete files we as admin are only responisble to retore the deleted files. I also told the CIO if you want to get the exect folder stracture then we should run a daily full backup, but even this one is not always 100% going to work, also this is not possible to run a daily full backup because we have 3 TB data.

Thanks

[LegAEI]

There are options here:

1. Do nothing, explain the limitations of technology to your users and let them know the plan is to retain data, not remove it. So if you get more data than you WANT with a restore, so be it. It's better than not getting the files you NEED back!

2. Look in to the deduplication storage feature of Backup Exec. This will allow you to run full backups daily (processor/ram are considerations, research before you purchase the license) without actually incrementing your storage.

[Shahin]

Thank you for the reply,

yes you are right, I will try to explain this to the customers and they will  know what they can expect from us. and I think I will run the full backup more frequently, and instead of once a month I think I will run it once week or once in 2 weeks, this way customers dont need to look so far as a month to clean up thier resotred folders.

Thanks