NTBackup - incremental problem

[billsbury]

I'm trying to prevent the transfer of redundant data for backups. I have like 20 GB of data that I back up on a weekly basis, but only like 100 MB of it actually changes. So, I thought I might do incremental backups.

I can't get it to work correctly. I do the full backup, then when I try to do the incremental backup, it only yields folder structure but no actual files within the folders.

I have tried many different things. I have even tried using one .bkf file for the full backup and another file for the incremental backup. No matter what I do, the incremental portion always yields only folders, no files (for you database people, I only get 'metadata').

There's something huge I'm missing here. Anyone have any ideas?

Thank you.

-Bill from IN

 

[spyordie007]

Sounds like you're getting yourself into trouble.

Incremental backups will backup and reset the archive bit so if you run only incremental backups you would have to apply every single one of them in order to do a restore.

Make sure to review information about the different backup types:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu...ocs/en-us/types_of_backup.mspx?pf=true

Sounds like it might be a better option to do periodic (say once a month) full backups and than daily differential backups. This way you would never have to recover from more than 2 pieces of media.

Erik

 

[kevnich2]

I would avoid incremental backups as well. Do a full backup maybe once a month or once a week if it's for business and then do differential backups for every day in between. As spyordie mentioned, incremental reset the archive bit so only the data that changed since the last incremental backup is actually backed up. With differential backups, the archive bit is not reset so it backups up all data since the last full backup or incremental backup (full backup and incremental both reset the archive bit)

 

[billsbury]

thank you gentlemen, I think I'll try that