Best Practice? Number of incrementals before starting new full backup

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by scottlid, Aug 5, 2008.

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  1. scottlid

    scottlid Registered Member

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    Best Practice question:

    How many incremental backups are "too many" and one should start a new full backup and what is the reason behind your suggestion?

    Thanks!
     
  2. MrMorse

    MrMorse Registered Member

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    Hi,
    fact is: if only one incremental TIB-file is corrupted the whole backup is screwed up. Every incremental TIB increases your risk.

    My opinion:
    if it is possible I avoid incremental backups. Then fullbackups only.

    In reallity I've installed tasks with incrementals for a customer.
    But only 4 times. Then will be created a new fullbackup.
    He can lose data upto 4 days without to crash ;)
    Reason for incrementals: Ti works shorter. That decreases the workload on the PC.
     
  3. dougaross

    dougaross Registered Member

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    Differential backups are a good alternative. You not dependent on a chain of backups - only the full and any of the differentials. Use less disk space and time than just doing fulls.
     
  4. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    Not exactly correct. The archive is OK from the base up to the bad incremental. If what you want to restore is after the bad incremental then you indeed have a problem.

    FWIW, I only do Full archives as well but if I were to do incrementals, I would very likely do a Full on say, Sunday and then incrementals for the remainder of the week (as a maximum period) and then start over with a new Full.

    Regardless of whether you do only Fulls, Incrementals or Differentials, never have only one archive available. Keep as many historical archives as your storage space permits.
     
  5. scottlid

    scottlid Registered Member

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    Thanks, this has all been helpful so far. Any other opinions are appreciated as well.
     
  6. Xpilot

    Xpilot Registered Member

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    The number of incrementals also depends on your defragging habits. Defragging causes the next increment to be nearly as large as a full image. So if you do a weekly defrag follow this with a full image and then increments for the rest of the week.

    My choice is to have my backup drive big enough to take the number of full images that I am ever likely to need. This keeps things very simple. I actually oversized this drive to take care of future expansion. This means that I can still meet my requirements without using any compression. The result is faster backups and restores, the sort of trade off that I like.

    Xpilot
     
  7. dougaross

    dougaross Registered Member

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    I defrag using diskeeper which defrags daily. My daily differentials are usually less than 4g where my full image is 35G
     
  8. Xpilot

    Xpilot Registered Member

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    That is quite understandable as you are running defrags on a daily basis so on any one day, especially if you have not been very active in making other changes, there is not much movement for the defragger to do.

    Drifting slightly OT my opinion is that daily regular defragging or even continual defragging that is available with some defrag programs is a waste of computer resources.
    I have experimented with Diskeeper and also Perfect Disk. I eventually have gone back to the much derided Windows own defrag tool because I have not seen any measurable gains in using anything else. In my last trial of Perfect Ddisk after using only the Windows tool for about six months the recomendation was that no defrag was needed.
    Placing the page file on a seperate hard drive on its own controller is on ther other hand worth its weight in gold and for good measure the page file never needs defragmenting.

    Xpilot
     
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