What are the benefits of File vs Image backup?
I know that with file backup I can specify specific patch/folders/files.
With an Image backup I can mount the image and recover specifc files.
So why use File backup?
When you say, “mount the image,” what do you mean?
File Backups are used as a way to pull data from a backup site and either restore it to someone, or drop it back onto a machine; it prevents down-time and is easy to retrieve data if it happens to go missing. All that is needed is to access the location where the backup is, locate the file in the file backup, and pull it.
Image Backups are used as a way to retrieve your entire server if it crashes due to hardware, drivers, or finally smashing it open through frustration. It is meant to be a complete save state of your drive; this helps prevent people from losing hours of work or physical/virtual servers due to either having to rebuild it, or not having a state to revert back to.
It just depends on what you need to do.
With “mount the image” I mean that I can open the image and pull data from it just like I can from File Backup.
I know that I can restore a complete disk/os with Image backup. I can’t see the point of doing image and file backup at the same time when I can get the files out of the image backup.
File backups are much less taxing on both client and server. You can do them much more quickly, so that is why you would do file backups.
Hello,
is it possible to backup one disk as a image and the other file based?
And besides that:
Is something implemented to save space between the image and the file based backup?
I.e. after doing a full image backup, the incremental file backup could be empty, as everything is in the image-backup already.
Greetings,
Hendrik
In the webinterface you can enable client settings, then tell UrBackup to backup only specific directories for file backups and specific drives for image backups. Specifics depend on whether you have Windows or Linux but either way it’s straightforward.
Can’t comment on storage issues of image backups, don’t do those yet.
Currently not directly. You can save storage space if you use ZFS dedup, btrfs offline dedup or Windows Server 2012 dedup.
Good idea.
But then I suppose, I should avoid compression in urbackup, right?
Yes.
I thought a bit about the dedup. Isn’t there a high probability, that there would be an offset between the Data in the image and the file based backup, that would cause the chunks on the disc being only partially identical?
I.e. if 1234567890 is stored in a file, on the VHD, 12 3456 7890 might be in one block, whereas on the file based backup 1234 5678 90 might be in one block. This way, a dedup would not be possible, right?
Greetings,
Hendrik