I have a lot of dudes about the “mandatory” of make complete file backups when use UrBackup with BTRFS filesystem.
Is reasonable to supose that if UrBackup is reliable, really I can make incremental backups forever in this scenario?
I know that if you have complete backups you are “more safe”, but if all works as it supposed to work, in theory,really would be unecessary make complete file backups?
Maybe other option, could be, that in server side, the software automatically could consolidate a number of incremental backups in a complete backup periodically? Could be possible to implement this to prevent make more complete backups after the first one?
Maybe another solution could also be to verify the backups from time to time. Against the hashes in the database and against the hashes for the files on the client.
Full-backup is useful when you need to restore a whole volume.
Generally speaking, a full restore starts from a full backup and then apply all incrementals.
For example, when you design a backup model, you need to estimate space to restore and time you have to do it.
Full restore = faster if you have only 1 operations - longer if you have many operations (full + n. incremental)
Partial restore = depends, may be faster with many small inc backup…
I don’t think this is true for UrBackup. It uses symbolic links for incremental backups so each incremental backup is, at least at the filesystem level, a complete backup. Only on the disk they share the same space. Restore time should therefore be always the same. (Talking of filebackups, don’t know how it is with image backups)