Cumulative Incremental Backups

[dbeck]

Folks,

Ran a successful Full backup on Friday June 17th.  Created a Cumulative Incremental Backup and scheduled this to start Monday evening at 21:00.  The job started with no problem, but seems to be doing a full backup of everthing even though the job was created as a Cumulative Incremental Backup.

Any ideas?
Dave

[Andy_Welburn]

& operating systems are we looking at here?

[ArjunS]

Please refer following document :

http://support.veritas.com/docs/246398 - Cumulative Incremental backup is the same number of files and same data size as the Full backup.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/248769 - Cumulative Incremental backup schedule is run as a Full backup

I hope this would answer your query.

[dbeck]

Andy,

Running NB 6.0 Version MP7S01.

ArjunS sent a reply as well to refer to these docs.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/246398 - Cumulative Incremental backup is the same number of files and same data size as the Full backup.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/248769 - Cumulative Incremental backup schedule is run as a Full backup

One would think the folks at Symantec Veritas would have just done a simple Incremental backup solution without having to adjust time frequencies between the full and cumulative incremental backup jobs.

-d-

[dbeck]

ArjunS,

After looking at these links, one would think the folks at Symantec Veritas would have just done a simple Incremental backup solution without having to adjust time frequencies between the full and cumulative incremental backup jobs.,

Thanks for the tips.  Will let you know how everthing goes once I get the jobs rescheduled.

-d-

[dbeck]

Folks,

After reading the links,  its still somewhat confusing getting the timestamps set correctly between Fulls, and Cumulative Incrementals.  I have two Full backup jobs that run every two weeks and use the Calendar Schedule. The Starttime on the 1st Full backup job starts on Friday night at  22:00 with the Duration Days set to zero.  The Starttime for the  second Full backup job starts on Saturday night at 22:00 with Duration Days set to Zero.  The Fulls  run every two weeks starting on Friday night.  The Cumulative Incrementals are set to run M, Tu, Wed, Thur, starting at 22:00 with Duration Days set to   Zero.   What  needs set to make the Cumulative Incrementals run as Incrementals and not Fulls???  A Full backup has completed successfully.

Thanks
-D-

[Marianne]

Please confirm that your incremental and full schedules are all in the same policy?

It's not documented very well, but incrementals only work when there's a full backup within the same policy.

Please post your policy config:
bppllist <policy_name> -U

[dbeck]

Marianne,

Have attached the Users Home Directory backp Policy B2D_Home.  Will now setup a Incremental schedule with the Full B2D_Home policy.  Will let you know how it goes. 

Thanks for the tip
-D-

[dbeck]

Marianne,

Looks like when scheduling the jobs there is an option to override the storeage policy unit to direct backups to different media types.   With this in mind, the Full (users home directories) backup is scheduled to run tonight and will start at 6:00pm and go to the storage unit (store1_home) pointing to the (/export/store1/home_backups) folder and the Cumulative Incremental will start tomorrow morning at 7:00am and go to storeage untit (store1_home_inc) pointing to the (/export/store1/home_backups_inc) folder.   Will let you know tomorrow the outcome.

-D-

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

I am quite confident that adding the incr schedule to the same policy will have the desired effect.
Not sure why this is not explicitely mentioned in the Admin Guides...

[dbeck]

Marianne,

Adding the Incremental job schedule to the same policy as the Full worked.  The Incr job completed and only  directories and files that changed since the last full were backed up.

Thanks again for the tips.

Dave