Restore from differential backup?

general discussion
1

Hi guys,

I am new to URBackup and I find it an appealing software. However, it is not clear to me how are you supposed to do a restore. I’ve seen that I can browse the files of individual file backups, like in the server file system (the developer also specified Samba, which would allow the same.) But what about differential merging? How can I handle that? (same for images).

many thanks,
Zsolt

2

So nobody restores from differential backup, or nobody cares. Then I wonder whether I should use differential backup at all?

3

The differential image backups can be restored via restore CD.

The files do not behave like differential/incremental backups. If you look at the urbackup backup storage folder every file backup is like a full backup on the file system. If you want to restore you can just copy over files or use any sync utility. The difference between fulls and incrementals lies in what gets transferred not what is stored.

4

Thanks, that’s great and a piece of important information. It might be useful to include it in the documentation, because it was not obvious for me.

1 Like
5

I can’t find anything on how to do a file restore, not an image restore. We have encrypted HD’s on our laptops here so an image backup won’t work, so I do file backups, but I can’t find anything on how to do a file backup restore (users only backup specific folders they NEED backed up)

How can it be done without going into the server backup folder and just copying files?

6

You could browse the backups inside the web interface.
From there, you can download single files, folders or full backups (as .zip files) and paste them in the right place.
In this way, you don’t need direct access to the backup storage (via Samba, NFS, …).

7

Have you tested this? There might be issues with the master boot record restore but other than that the image backup should create an unencrypted usable image.

The backup browser and file restore is so rudimentary because the file backups are stored in their original directory structure and are easily accessible as files and there are numerous options to access files on a server (FTP, samba, NFS, SCP, WebDAV, lots of web apps…).

With the next major version file metadata is being backed up and to restore that there will be restore functionality within the client, plus it seems that nowadays people want to access their files via web browser and not via the file explorer :wink: