Need help with retention settings

Hi there,

I’m new to urBackup, and what a great product! It’s a lifesaver, and I’m thrilled with it.

I need some help with retention settings. I would like make a full backup once per week, and incremental backups daily. I would like to retain the two most recent full backups, and incremental backups only since the most recent full.

And a related question: will urBackup remove a full backup that meets the cleanup criteria if there are still incremental backups that rely on it?

Thank you!

Hi

Frequency :
For image backup : it work as you usually think a full and an incremental would work (an incremental need a full).
Also image backup only work on windows. And unless you buy the cbt plugin, they are quite long to run.
So you take them not too often, like : a full image like once every 1-2 month, then an incremental per week.

But for file backup : full and incremental are mostly the same. Just that a full rescan everything and basically it allows to catch bugs/corruptions.
A full is longer to run but use the same amount of storage that an incremental.
Also file backup dont depends on anything (you can delete any backup, there’s no chain).

So for file backup the usual thing is to run a full once every 1-3 months (not week).
Then the incremental you usually don’t care too much, unless special case it takes minutes to run.

Retention:
You have two paths that you can mix, even if it can be hard to imagine the result.

One path via the main tab, is for example :
Keep min 5 backup, max 30 backups.
Then only delete backup if there s no enough space or the max backups has been reached (30), but always keep at least min backup (5).

The other path is via archiving, for example :
Main tab : keep min 1 backup, max 1 backups (or some other low number).
Then in archive tab, tell it to mark a backup for archive every day and keep it during one week. and every 7 days, mark a backup for archive during 15 days.

I don’t think it’s solved in the stable version, but it should be in beta version.
But there was a bug for image backups were the full/incremental chain were not kept properly.

2 Likes

Interesting, thank you for the information! That helps.

@orogor

Could you expand a little on what you mean by this? What’s a scenario in which I would need a full backup, if an incremental contains all the data? How does it catch bugs/corruptions? Does that mean when I run the full, it will error out if there’s a corruption where an incremental wouldn’t?

Thank you!

There was bug on which permissions were not updated on incremental , but only on full backups. Some other bugs were only solved after a full backup. (That kind of bug is discovered/fixed like once a year)

Because a full backup re-check all the hashs of all files.
If a backup file was corrupted; its hash won’t match the one on the server.
Thus it will be re-downloaded as a new file, independently of modification time or any metadata.

So a full acts more like a safeguard than anything else.

1 Like

Old thread, I know :slight_smile:
I found myself reading it and got confused.

I’m trying to do the exact same thing @jgrunow doing.
I’m interested in using only image backup (not interested in files)

trying to configure full every 7 days
and incr every day
always keeping 2 weeks (2 full’s with all the incr chain)

can someone assist me please on what to configure exactly?
will it delete the old backups by itself or should I create a script to run in task scheduler for cleanup?

That is the same as what I’m doing for Windows group too…

Be aware that while it shows full every 1 day, I limit when it can start (run) under a different tab; the timing/window is based on when the previous one finished, so if you set it to anything less than the allowed window, then it will start at the start of the window - rather than progressively getting later into the window, which was what I was seeing previously…

You have to bear in mind that in order to get the Friday image of two weeks ago, I need to also have the preceeding days available too…so allow for enough incremental images to cover an extra week, and you should be fine…

It will delete or manage by itself; was going to post a screenshot for that, but it includes my system names, which I don’t want to share…

Here is where I restrict the run times…

This is for the start time of the particular backups, if a backup hasn’t finished when the window ends, the backup will continue to run…