Just wanted to confirm my understanding- I’m backing up approx 3tb worth of files currently and growing daily (stupid raw photo format…). My offsite server doesn’t have a great connection and my current ETA is 7 days for the full file backup.
And to my understanding, urbackup doesn’t have the hardcore ‘incremental’ system where all incremental file backups are true deltas where you need a full backup plus all the incrementals after it to recreate things.
therefore:
1/ Am I correct that the next full backup will take another 7 days - since it will re-send all files?
2/ Is it a good idea to turn off full backup? Or should I just let it churn away on a full backup every (say) 30 days
tldr: I don’t really see the benefit of doing full backups for files. Am I correct?
No, it will not send all files.
If you use a btrfs file system on the server then it will APPEAR on the server as a full backup. But,btrfs uses snapshots and copy on write.
I believe that if you use other file system - the server will still use smart linking.
I know that the client and server negotiate what has changed for incremental and only transfer that.
It us true that your understanding of what an incremental backup using deltas is NOT what urbackup does. IMHO what you describe is a somewhat (at least circa 1980) outdated method. Filesystems such as ZFS and btrfs and others are capable of linking in such a way that an incremental contains ALL files - as though they were a full backup. Thus not requiring a restore to incrementally restore deltas in the correct order.
Maybe this is not what you want? Maybe you want to be able to just restore the most recent delta always? But, you can still obtain the same result with some simple date based copying.
- I use incrementals every 2 days and full every 60 days. But, I am using btrfs on the server - so, the storage cost/increase is minimal.
You can use a container version of urbackup on the server (that’s what I do), If your server OS is doze based - you can even use btrfs (Winbtrfs - open source for XP upwards)
You don’t specify the OS for either server or client, new data averages or schedules - so I am unable to give more helpful information.
However, should you supply more detail - I will be happy to try and help.
Dave