Incremental backups failing Secure Zone Full

[Donald.Landru]

Ok... I first apologize for not digging through all threads to see if this is already covered.


My problem is i am using TI 8.0 Build 937
I have a daily incremental backup setup to run on one of my machines (the rest are weekly) 9 systems in all running TI

So after initial setup of the system I made a Full Image. Now after about 2 weeks of incremental backups I get errors stating that the Secure Zone is full.. Now what is confusing me about this is the Secure Zone is set to be 2 gigs bigger then the partition I am imaging (drive C: 7.99 gigs, ASZ is 10.02 gigs) So my question is how can the SZ be full when the maximum data that could be backed up is only 8 gigs... That should leave a 2 gig buffer space is case it would need it for some reason. I am just really confused as to what the problem is...

Note: I changed one of my other systems from a Weekly backup to a daily backup and it does the exact same thing....


Thank You!

Donald Landru
Landru Computer Repair

[pjb024]

I think you must be assuming that an incremental backup replaces the previous incremental backup which it does not. Each time you create an incremental backup you are writing an image of all the sectors that have changed since the previous incremental. This image is appended to all the previous incrementals including the full backup that you originally made. Eventually the secure zone will be full of images and your backup fails with an 'out of space' error. This is what you are experiencing. The only way you can successfully run a backup is to do another full backup which will overwrite the previous full backup and free up the space occupied by all the incrementals that were appended to that full backup. Of course this means that for the duration of this full backup you will be in danger if the disk you are backing up should fail before the backup has completed; unlikely but a possibility. The way to avoid this scenario is to have a secure zone that will be large enough to contain two backup cycles. Each backup cycle being a full backup and whatever number of incrementals you wish to make before creating another full backup. Typically this would be a full weekly backup and daily incrementals so you would have a full backup and up to 6 incrementals in each cycle. By having a secure zone that is large enough to accomodate two cycles (or more, but at least two cycles) you will never have an 'out of space ' condition because when TI finds the space in SZ to be insufficient for the current backup it will automatically overwrite the oldest backup cycle. TI cannot do this if there is only one backup cycle in SZ and you are trying to append another incremental.