Image Backup: Full vs Incremental Efficiency

general discussion
1

I am testing UrBackup server on a Ubuntu box using btrfs filesystem for backup storage. Nice program, thank you! I have a Windows 10 client with a 500GB hard drive using about 90GB space. I assumed the full image backup would take the longest and most storage space on the server.

I noticed it took about 40 minutes to full-image the client’s 90 GB. I was thinking that the incremental image backups would go much faster. It seems to take about the same time and am wondering if the incremental has to upload the complete data image in order to compare the differences from full (and possibly subsequent incremental backups) to the new partial image? It does appear to only take approximately 3GB for each incremental backup so storage is saved compared to running only full image backups. Am I noticing this correctly?

I am mainly concerned with network traffic if I deploy this to the ~25 clients on this network.

Thank you…

Paul

2

That’s the backup logic for file/image transfers.


But really , do file backup often, like at least once per day, and a full every month or less.
And do full image every month or less, then maybe weekly image.

There’s users in the few hundreds client range, i don’t think anyone reported with thousands clients yet.
25 clients should go without too much itch if you got everything cabled at 100M/1G

3

Checkout the cbt commercial license if you want to do a lot of image based backups. It speeds things up a lot.

4

Thanks for the reply and your info, Orogor. I read the manual, but failed to catch the concept. Thanks. Network is mostly 100M and working toward 1G.

May be best to accept the defaults when installed?: Image full - 60 days, image incremental - 7? days. File full - 30 days, incremental - 6 hours.

Is it general practice to backup ALL files on the drive or is it more common to target the Windows C:\User directory only?

5

Thanks Rhetor. I will check that out. I’m just looking for a way to get back to “normal” after a disaster asap.

6

Hi

Yes, start from default settings and work from that, change a bit every day, then week or so.

For C:\User or not, i dunno. That’s kinda up to you to check if saving the whole c: is to expensive.

Also maybe you create d: data drive, then add this as well.
I guess most usually peoples will ask for a deleted “my documents” or whatnot , so it would be c:\users, thus 6 hours granularity.
If not the granularity would be weekly as you’d have to dig an image, and it would kinda be their fault as they did not stored data where you told them to.

7

Great! Thanks. That makes sense.

Funny, they never see it as their fault when they need a backup from a location I mentioned was not being backed up. :-C

Thank you very much indeed. I will default and adjust as we go.