Urbackup linux server, windows clients forever incrmental

1

Hi

I would like to know if I can use urbackup client on windows file server to make forever incremental images to a Linux urbackup server and windows users. My main motivation is that we have a lot of users still using PST files and would love to keep their system backuped incrementally without needing to copy these big pst files every time.

I would ideally to do the following:
Recover my windows users files from the latest image in the event of a breakdown.
Backup windows file server to incremental forever and archive it yearly so we can recover a specific version of a file from 6 months ago.

PST clients is our biggest challenge at the moment and would be very happy if I can make an incremental image of say 100-200mb per user per day including changes in the outlook file. My idea is then to replicate all data from the urbackup server offsite to our offices.

Please advise.

2

Daily pst incremental is almost equal to daily full backup.
Since the entire pst file is treated as a single file, whenever a file is modified in case a mail is received or deleted, it recognizes as a change in entire pst file and complete data is backed up.

3

That’s not correct.

1 Like
4

Thanks what i have observed in my testing. Every time i run incremental backup of pst file, my incremental backup size is almost equal to full backup.

5

Thanks for the replies. I also had the same problem backing up PSTs on file level between windows server and clients. In my head backing up the windows clients on a incremental image basis should only save the changes since the last image. But then would i need my server be btrfs or zvol for this to work or is btrfs only needed for for always incremental?

6

Per default it transfers the differences only with Internet clients. You can change that in the advanced tab (Incremental file backup transfer mode).

It can only directly store only the differences with btrfs on Linux. Otherwise block level offline/online dedup would accomlish the same effect, e.g. with ZFS or the Windows Server 2012 offline dedup.

7

How have you configured the pst file backup ?

As a file system backup, for example C:\ drive as selection list or add the path of outlook profile.

8

So i can do incremental image backups from windows client to linux server but only with btrfs?

My understanding is if urbackup makes a full image from a windows client ( vss snapshot im sure) and does an incremental image tomorrow where i modified 3 excel files and received 43 emails, it would make another vss snapshot, calculate the difference and save an incremental image say of 200mb? And the day after that? How would the incements be maintained?

Will this only be possible if the linux urbackup server is running btrfs?

9

I added the Outlook Files folder to backup

10

Hi,

I have given the path - C:\Users\mohan\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook as the Default directories to backup.
I have attached the screen-shot of selection list and advanced option set for outlook backup for your reference.

Outlook selection.png1024Ă—768 88.7 KB

Adv option for outlook backup.png1024Ă—768 100 KB

Outlook bkp storage utilised.png1024Ă—768 119 KB

My Storage repository is a ZFS volume. As you an see my incremental backup is more than my full backup.
Let me know if any modifications should be made in Advanced setting for Outlook pst file backup.

11

The Incremental Flag is only for the transfer… on the backup storage the whole file is assembled back… e.g. copied and altered by the differences. therefore it’s normal that your size goes up after every backup.
only btrfs is able to do real incremental backups as the snapshots are building up on each other…
on zfs unchanged files are hardlinked and changed files are copied and altered as far as i know.
if you really wanna have only incrementals saved on zfs you should look into deduplication. be aware thats a massive RAM sink