Backup Types

[mmoseley]

Hiya guys,

Got a really stupid "noob" question, Im not quite sure on how to setup backup's correctly,

What i want is to make a full backup of users files and then every day or week (not decided) is for the backup to start and it will change the .bkf accordingly, ie; if a user has deleted a file it will delete it in the backup or if they add a file it will add it to the .bkf file

Sorry about this stupid question,

Thanks

[Heebeejeebee]

Half the point of a backup is to be able to restore files that users have deleted accidentally. If you remove deleted files from the backup set there's little point in having it for user files. I'm not even sure any backup software will remove files from a backup set since it's simply not done.

Full backup and incremental/differential is the way to go. Only changed and new files will be added to the backup set making it much smaller than the full backup.

You'll want to keep old backups for a specified number of weeks/months as well.

I assume you're using NTBackup?

HBJB

[petectid]

How backups are carried out depends on the importance of your data. There are three types of backup that can be used. These are Full, Incremental and Differential. Full backup does exactly what is says on the tin, all data selected is backed up, Incremental backs up only data changed since the last full backup or the last incremental backup and finally the differential backup, backs up all data since the last full backup. I do a full backup every Friday followed by differential backups Monday to Thursday; these are scheduled to run in the evening when the systems are less likely to have open files.

Backup your System state data for your DC.
And test your backups occasionally by restoring its data to another location; a backup is useless if it does not work.

[mmoseley]

Hey chaps,

We do already have a backup system in place but its becoming unreliable...My network manager frequently stresses about loosing data and we had a Terastation sitting there doing nothing because they couldnt sync it with Active Directory, but now i have it working and im going to run it as a secondary backup system.

so the only difference between Incremental and Differential is that Incremental backups up changes that has happened since the last backup?

[Heebeejeebee]

Incremental = all changed/new files since the last backup (any type)
Differential = All changed/new files since the last full backup.

HBJB