I am new to urbackup. I have installed a server and a client. on the client i have a test folder where i have created File A. I perform a full file backup manually and I can see file A being copied to the server. Great. Now i add File B on the test folder. I perform a file incremental backup this time, and I see File B…AND File A copied again. Isn’t the incremental backup supposed to ONLY copy File B?
File A in the second (incremental) backup is not a soft or hard link. It’s a full copy of the original file.
What am I doing wrong?
For your testing, are you using very small files? The file system overhead for a link is the same as storing a small file, so I think UrBackup avoids the extra bookkeeping of the link process by just saving the file.
Thank you for your reply. That makes sense, and I was indeed using very small files. However, I’ve also used 2GB+ files, and they are also copied on every incremental backup run. I am so confused.
How do you know it’s copying the large files? The backup that you see when looking in the web interface list of file backups is a “point in time” assembly of all files in the backup set. It is a synthetic full backup built from previous backups plus the files added, changed, and deleted according to the latest incremental backup. This lets you restore any file as it was on that date without needing to know what backup set it may be found in.
The actual backup process is smart enough to avoid sending the contents of files that the server already contains. Even for “full” backups only the directory information (metadata) is copied; things like location, filename, dates, and permissions. Incremental backups use the list of files kept on the client and only send information about files that changed. File contents are transferred only if the server doesn’t have a copy of that file already - as determined by the hash numbers that look at only the bits within the file.
Hi, thank you for your response. I know (unless my eyes decieve me) because I can see in my “urbackup” directory, directories corresponding to each differential backup i’ve run, and on each of those directories the repeating 2GB files ars there. Also, a size check shows that the 2GB files are being copied each time.
I have not found a way to see the files backed up, or list of them, in the web GUI yet. Nither was able to find a “restore button”. Would be great if you could guide me on that! (I know it’s off-topic!)
I am sure I am doing something wrong, just can’t find out what yet. I’ll post some screenshots tomorrow.
Thank you for your help!
Hi,
I am still experiencing this problem (I am trying to make it work after a hiatus), however there is an update: I see your point and agree with you Don_Wright, regarding transfer size. Looking at the logs I can see that when I add a file (say 5MB zip), 5MB are transferred. If I run a second incremental backup immediately after, the logs show about 1K transferred. That makes sense.
However, i definitively can see that the file has been duplicated in the backup folder on that second incremental backup run. It’s almost like the server (windows fs) is duplicating the file within the backup folder for some reason, and I don’t think it’s a hard or soft link.
Instead of 5MB, i now see 10MB in the backup folder.
I am not sure how to change this behaviour or why it happens.
Any help will be appreciated!
Okay. I finally understand what happened. It was all my mistake. My lack of understanding of hard links on windows fs did not let me see that the total drive space did not reflect the “duplicated” backup files / folders. Thank you for your help Don!
1 Like
Thank you very much. It happened to me too. SOLVED!