Incremental Issues

general discussion
1

TESTED ON:
I have tested this on both a NAS drive and physical HDD in the server.
one difference i noticed is on the Physical HDD it creates symlinks
On the NAS drive it does not create a symlink
But both NAS and Physical end up with the same results described below.

ISSUE:
after the first Full File Backup has ran and the next few days as it continues to do incremental backups the file size does not go down

EXAMPLE:
I have a software folder that is 20gb large
each backup that occurs is 20gb large and no changes have occurred on the source

QUESTION:
why are the incremental backups still the same size as the original backup

2

Hi,
can you let me know the following info…

  • Is the size being reported from urbackup web interface or the servers filesystem?

  • What filesystem did you use on the physical device and which filesystem is the NAS?

cheers,
Brad

3

WOW Now why didn’t i think of the FILE SYSTEM would be a good starting point LOL

CURRENT FILE SYSTEM OF IOMEGA EZ 2Tb Storage is --> XFS
It has the ability to go to ext4
not sure if either one of those support MKLink

Yes the file system size is correctly located in the server logs.

4

The question is, if hard links are working correctly on the NAS. You could test this using the Command here: https://superuser.com/questions/255731/make-a-hard-link-without-extra-programs-in-windows-7
It will also write it into the log if it cannot create hard links. If it uses hard links you have to look at the overall used space, as most directory size tools count hard linked files more than once.

I’ll look further into the symlink issue. I recently changed something there.

5

OK you were correct its the file format
mklink /H
did not work on the backup drive giving error its not NTFS

so with that said here is my next question

  1. since the MKLINK is not working on the drive format I utilize and its not creating a CURRENT folder
  2. how do i determine which folder is the most recent FULL File Backup and which one is the incremental backup…

PS
my initial diagnoses was incorrect URBAKUP is still deleting old incremental backup with out the MKLINK’s working

6

The folder names are a date YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS. You can just sort that alphabetically and you get them in ascending or descending order. There should be no difference between fulls and incrementals, they behave the same once on disk. If hardlinks are not working it even creates copies for each backup…