Re: SBS 2008 Backup - force full backup?

Larry Struckmeyer [SBS MVP] wrote:
Agreeing with Les, and adding that you have perhaps got the wires twisted a little bit. I understand the desire to have copies of your user files from x months ago (remember that copies of the system state from 90 days + are less useful).

But consider this example:

Total capacity of the SBS = 500 GB with 250 GB actually used. External drive - 1 TB

With the first backup you consume 250 GB of the external drive, and if it were 1 TB you could fit 4 of these (maybe) on the external drive. Therefore after 4 days, or 4 weeks, your drive is full. Actually, I think it maybe worse, as the image may be the full 500.

With incremental block based backup you might find that there are hundreds of available versions of the files that are changing, depending on how many files actually change between backups. Because each of the "snapshots" is a stand alone item, if file_X changes every day it is backed up every day, you can restore any one of the versions until you find the one you want.

When the drive finally fills up, the backup program moves off the oldest ones to make room for the newest ones. If memory serves, no file is ever completely removed, so long as the drive exists. So if you have only one copy of your last will and testament, and it never changes, it will never be expunged from the backup disk.

To avoid this you would have to archive that drive as soon as it fills, but that would be true of the drive that had only 4 full backups on it as well.

If the idea is that the drive might fail, this is no different if there is 1 full plus 250 partials, or if there are 4 fulls, but if that possibility bothers you, get an external enclosure with RAID1 drives that can be swapped.


Yes, I understand the way it works and it is a better mechanism than before in many ways, primarily because of the (forced) use of disks as opposed to tapes.

But I want to choose to run a complete backup if I want without having to delete the existing backup on the destination volume - not a unreasonable request.

This can be done for sure from a preliminary review of the way it works - such as divide into multiple partitions and schedule a WBADMIN script to run to specific one each time. Or run as a scheduled 'one time' backup where the whole volume isnt taken over. Need to test it.

.

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