Feature Request: Backup Merge instead of Full Files

Greetings,

I wonder if a “Merge Backups” functionality would be added to the product, for remote laptops sending files to the main server.

In a scenario where a Full File Backup is created every month, the remote Laptos should send a large amount of data monthly.

But if the 31st day since the Full Backup, a merge between the Full and the first Incremental is done at the server side, a Full File backup would not be really needed, and I would offer to my users the latest 30 days backup.

Hope the request is clear. Thanks a lot for your job and kindest regards.

Sorry, I don’t get the problem. The current state can be a bit confusing though. You basically can only do one full file backup and then incrementals and will allways have all files. See http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/urbackup/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=104&p=625 where we already discussed this.

Sorry if I did not explained correctly myself.
What I mean is:

I have several remote computers copying ONLY via internet. I would like to keep latest 30 days of their File backup, but I do not need more than those 30 days.

Now I should do a Full File Backup every 10 days and “keep” two full file backup, so I would have those 30 days only.

But a Full File takes a long time to perform, and keeping months and months of the data is not required and is also space consuming; the software used in the remote PCs modifies quite a lot of small files that will be copied every day.

That is why I was trying to find a way to avoid full backups over the internet -too long- while keeping a small number of “versions” at the backup server -to avoid a large space occupation.

As explained there really is no difference between incremental and full file backups except what gets transfered.

So, given that I understood correctly what you want to do it can be accomplished by
*First running a full backup (you have to do that anyways)
*Setting the full backup interval to a high number – that way it will not do another one.
*Deleting the full backup, by setting the max number of full backups to zero or by deleting the folder manually (Preferably after the first incremental backup is run, otherwise everything is transfered again)
*If you want to keep an incremental longer use the archiving feature as a full backup replacement

If I understood you correctly this should work. The incremental backups are indistinguishable from full backups once they are done. The deduplication of files is done via hard links by the file system.

Perfect, thanks a lot.