I’m looking for a new solution to our current home backup solution. We have several PCs with many very large drives and a single 30TB backup server. I’d love to be able to store a single full backup image of each drive in each computer as well as daily incremental image backups, but I don’t want to have to create a new full backup image every month. Instead, I would like to merge the oldest incremental backup on top of the full backup when disk space runs low. That way I always have a full backup that is potentially a few days to a few weeks old (depending on disk usage) as well as daily incremental backups recording changes since that full backup.
Is this something UrBackup can do? It has a lot of features and I’m having trouble understanding if that’s a possibility. As a programmer I can see such a feature would have the potential to accumulate errors, but I think that should easily mitigated through monthly hash checks of each block (which would presumably still be slow, but not nearly as slow as copying ~25TB over a 2.5Gb network every month or two while we’re still trying to use our computers).
You have described how UrBackup works. Full backups, and incremental backups that top up that data. Best way to understand it is get it installed and have a look.
Are you planning to replace your current backup server with UrBackup? If yes, then install urBackup server on it and backup one of your PCs and look a the options.
Personally I have a Unraid server supplying plenty of storage. UrBackup server sits on that server. I installl the clients on various computers around the house. And choose either image or file backups depending on needs.
Everything run through the web interface. Works well. Including the ability to dive into an image backup on the server to pull out a single file if needed.
Apologies - the way urbackup does backups depends on whether you choose file or image backups. File backups are essentially rolling backups whereas image backups are more like your current system.
I don’t think urbackup can merge image increments on to the last full image backup when disk space is low. Not sure that is a good idea when resources are tight.
You don’t need to merge them. Let the database sort that out. Incrementals will only store the differences. And then combine with the whole when needed for recovery. It is only recovery time would actual merge be needed, and then it recovers over the network.