like the old Palindrome, used a Tower of Hanoi rotation scheme, restore a file/folder/system and it would tell you the specific ( and minimum ) tapes required ... but isn't that basically the predecessor of Symantec's NetBackup product ?
Erik Goldoff IT Consultant Systems, Networks, & Security _____ From: Jeff Bunting [mailto:bunting.j...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 2:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Restores from Incremental backups I think the point was the software (BackupExec, I'm guessing) should be able to understand incremental restores and not rely on the operator to have to manually find & select each incremental copy for the restore. I always thought that was an obvious feature it lacked. Not being able to tell be how much disk space a restore was going to need was another. On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Ben Scott <mailvor...@gmail.com> wrote: On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 5:10 PM, jesse-r...@wi.rr.com <jesse-r...@wi.rr.com> wrote: > I understand the whole differential versus incremental pros/cons. ... > So, that's why I was wondering about an easier method to restore > incremental backups. If you really understand, why are you looking for something you obviously can't do? :-) Incremental only store the data since the last incremental, so you need all the incremental to restore all your data. If you don't use all the media you don't have all the data. There's no magic wand that re-creates data you don't have (as many people have discovered, much to their dismay). > ... with the files changing in some cases as much as they do, especially the > backing up of flat database files, and other things, differentials would > hurt us ... One strategy is monthly full, weekly differential, and daily incremental. That way, the worst case is restoring a full, a diff, and and four incs, instead of a month worth of incs. Another strategy is different schedules and rotations for your different data sets. Example: Some data that doesn't change often or much, but you have a lot of it. Do fulls every few months, plus differentials once a week or whatever. Some other data changes every day and overwrites old data. Do fulls every day of just that data. Etc. It should in theory be possible to have a backup system that "knows" how much data has changed, and automatically does diff or inc based on that, but I've never encountered such. Maybe the more expensive stuff, like Tivoli. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
