Do full and incremental schedules have to be in the same policy?

[jasw61]

We have a customer who has set up different policies for clients to backup.  One policy has a full schedule and the other policy has a differential schedule.  I found mention in NBU 7.0 that these schedules need to be within the same policy, but I cannot find this statement in the NBU 7.6 documentation.  Is this the case for NBU 7.6?

NBU 7.6.0.1 -- Win Server 2008 R2

Regards,

James

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Yes. Incremental and Full schedules need to be in the same policy. 

This has been the case for as long as I've known NBU (15 years) and is unfortunately not clearly documented in Admin Guides.

[SymTerry · Accepted solution]

After a quick look TECH164114 would be documentation your looking for: Incremental backups act as full backups if the backup policy doesn't contain a full backup schedule.

[CRZ · Accepted solution]

Look at it this way... if you've never taken a full backup under a particular policy, what image would that policy use to determine the "incremental" part of its incremental backup?

[jasw61]

Thanks, everyone!

Marianne, you hit the nail on the head about not being clearly documented!

SymTerry and CRZ, I knew that the first incremental would act as a full, but totally skimmed right by the fact that they would all act as fulls.

Thanks again!

James

[jim_dalton]

To answer Chris Z theory: the answer is: any full backup  of the client, so long as it is a full backup regardless of what policy it was done under.

It requires added logic to netb, but certainly not too far out of reach.

But to just work correctly right now, yes the policy being a constant is key.

Jim