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Rolling backup strategy

P

pbj75

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2003
Messages
208
I am looking for backup tool that lets me keep a rolling backup of the last 30 days (or so) of my WHS folders. I have an internal drive that is not part of the pool and I backup the folder shares every night.

I have tried Acronis 2012 incremental & differential, Syncback, and the built in solution but none do what I really want.

Acronis incremental/differential works fine, but at some point, Acronis wants to do a new snapshot of the whole folder share before restarting the incremental/differential steps. This ends up doubling the required backup space.

I just want the ability to go back in time a few weeks to recover stuff, hence my phrasing about a "rolling backup".

I used Syncback for a while to scan the folder shares every night and push any new files to the backup area. It was not an actual sync. This worked well and did not force a doubling of the disk space. The only time the required disk space increased was when a new file was added. The downside to this was when I would move files around and the files would show up in two spots, the old folder and the new one. There was no way for me to know the actual layout of folder shares at a specific date.

Any suggestions?
 
For a simple mirror you could use robocopy in a batch file running as a scheduled task. With the right switches it will scan, copy only changed files, and purge out files deleted from the source. I use it for keeping a backup NAS synced within a few hours of the primary and it works well. If I move a file/folder on the source it will be recopied to the mirror for the new location in the directory structure and deleted from the old location. That would give you a true mirror, like a snapshot taken the previous night. It would not handle keeping 30 days worth of incremental changes, deletions, etc though. Also, if you just move a rather large directory it will delete/recopy the entire thing. You can manually do very large moves though if it is a problem.

Syncback should be able to do the same mirroring task though, mirroring not only new files in the source but deletions and moves as well. I've used it in the past to do exactly that but I do recall getting the configuration just exactly right wasn't very intuitive.

Hopefully someone else can speak to the 30 day rolling backup. I don't know off hand of a quick setup to pull it off cleanly.
 
AppAssure does that and it works great.
It takes one full snapshot of the disk, and then only makes incremental snap shots. You can set it to take snapshots every 15 minutes to a day. It then keeps each snap shot for as long as you like, then it rolls them together at night. For example, you can do 15 minute snapshots all day, then condense them to hourly snapshots, then to daily, weekly, monthly etc. Or in your case, keep 1 daily snapshot for a month. You can do yearly backups if you have enough space. It doesn't take too much space though, as it does dedup and compression. Very powerful backup program and has a lot of other features.
It is expensive though, but it is the only back software that is actually worth the cost imo.
 
I use Cobian Backup 10. Its able to do incremental/differential backups forever. It can run "helper" programs of your choosing before and after a backup. You can compress individual files and/or keep different dated copies of those files (versioning; what you are describing).

How I Use It: I have Cobian run the first of every month. I plug in my external drive around that time. Cobian runs a separate program I made that generates a file list of all the files on the server, then stores that file list in a share and on the external drive. It then performs an incremental backup, only copying the files that are changed. When finished, I run a small program that makes a WHS alert to tell me the process is done. If I forget to plug my external in at the first of the month, Cobian will remember that a backup was missed and start as soon as I plug my external in.
 
Damn you guys (or girls) are good!

Two new apps for me to investigate and a possible suggestion with SyncBack. Great stuff.

Now I will do a deeper dive and see what I find.

Thanks so much.
 
I'm not sure I get what you mean by a rolling backup, but it sound close to what I do with Acronis. On my wife's PC (she works, as in self employed, on it from home), it does local incremental backups daily with a full backup every 14 days and it is set to only keeps two chains, and I have weekly incrementals to the server that does a full about every 10 weeks and keeps three of those. Once those are set, I only need to worry if the given full backup jumps up signficantly in size.

If you only want one full backup, you just need to set how many increments for a full backup and set Acronis to only keep one chain. Have you tried that? Or does that not do what you want?

I would expect Acronis 2012 is even more flexible. Many of the options in Acronis are not readily apparent so if you haven't, dig around in it a bit.
 
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