Confused over how TI fits into my backup strategy

Hi,

I've read several posts in this forum about how incremental and differential backups work in TI and, unfortunately, I've just more confused

What I'd intended to do is;

- First Saturday in month perform full backup (Wk1)
- Perform incremental backups Sun->Fri Wk1
- Perform differential backup Sat Wk2, the delete all incrementals
- Perform incremental backups Sun->Fri Wk2
- Perform differential backup Sat Wk3, the delete all incrementals
- etc. until we perform a new full backup first Saturday in the new month.

Now my questions are;

- my assumption is that when I schedule the differential backups, I select the full backup as the base file because I'm assuming that the way TI works, each differential will then include everything that's changed since that full backup at the start of the month. Is this correct?
- secondly, and I'm less sure here, which file do I base my incremental backups on? I'd intended to also base them on the full backup because this will obviously work during Wk1, and I assumed that if I delete all the incrementals after the differential backup at the start of Wk2, then the incremental's being based on the full backup would still be right - ie. it would see no other incrementals in this backup set "chain" and so would include everything that's changed since the full backup (in other words I assumed that the first incremental immediately after the differential backup in Wk2 would be more or less the same as that differential backup, if you follow me) and then the rest of that week's incremental's would be small being only based on the changes since the previous incremental. Is this correct?

Thanks for any help or insight anyone can give. David.

 

Just a slightly different point. How many different backups do you really need ?
I started off in the same way with several full backups and lots of incrementals but then after a while I sat back and thought " Am I just doing all these backups because I can and do I really need them all?" My conclusion has been that in fact a few days full backups are all I really need. the size of my slave drive and data volumes are such that I have 6 complete backups at any one time. IMHO these are more than sufficient for my purposes. In fact I would be happy enough with two or three.

Just a thought.
Xpilot

 

I rotate three full backups on my slave drive and find that is enough for my my purposes.

 

I don't know if it's too many or not, the idea is that you only keep the differential backups until the next month's full backup and then the cycle starts again. So I guess at the very end of the month you do get;

- one full backup
- four or five differential backups
- six incremental backups

but after that they get scrapped by another full backup and I usually keep three of those.

The reason for doing this is that I don't think I've got time for a full backup every weekend and I don't like the idea of 31 days worth of incrementals incase any in the chain become corrupted. So the incremental, followed by differential backup, was an attempt to provide more resilience whilst compromising against things not taking too long.

I was really wondering whether or not deleting the incrementals weekly would work but I've been able to test that this afternoon by just performing backups repeatedly on a small directory and all seems OK.

The biggest potential problem I can see is working out which are incremental and which are differential backups as there's no clue in the file name and I can't see any options to rename each scheduled task backups differently. Obviously, the names ought to be consistent and so you can work it out but it's a shame that I can see any easier way of naming them to show what they are.

Does anyone know if it is possible to name backup files differently?

Thanks, David