Creating Full then Differential Process

[customgt]

hello, ive messed with 10d on sbs2003 a few times now, i got it running full backups mon-fri currently...and man this thing is backing up 24hrs a day basicly.

I need to do a Full on Fridays, then Mon-Thursday do Differentials from the previous Fridays Full.

To do this I have a backup USB drive attached to the sbs2003 server. I create a new job for Fridays, and make it a Full Backup.
I then create another job that runs on Mon-Fri that is differential.

The thing that confuses me is how do these 2 jobs know they belong to the same data?
Example: THe full job runs on Friday, the Monday comes and the Differential Job runs...how does the DIfferential job know to look at the full job? I didnt set it up in backup exec to know about the full job.

Can someone please explain to me how it knows this?!

thanks

 

[customgt]

anyone? i was hoping to have an answer today...i have to do this tonite or tomorrow

 

[LawnBoy]

A differential refers to the last full backup run. BE knows about the full, because that job has already run.


"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[customgt]

how does BE know that you chose the same files in the differential job as you did in the full job>?

 

[LawnBoy]

The catalogs.


"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[customgt]

ok i set it up ill post back on the results

thanks

 

[LawnBoy]

It'll work



"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[customgt]

well it took 17 hours saturday to do a full email backup (just the private email store)

im on hour 16 of the differential backup of the private email store and its still running...

jeeeeeese...

Is this normal? It is backing up to a 2.0 usb drive. Which ive used the firewire cable also and it really want much difference...

The private mailbox store is 24gig in size, looks like around 70 mailboxes....

 

[LawnBoy]

Backing up Exchange is problematic. I can't help here, 'cause I run Groupwise. I'd start a new thread.


"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[hmallett]

The thing that confuses me is how do these 2 jobs know they belong to the same data?
Example: THe full job runs on Friday, the Monday comes and the Differential Job runs...how does the DIfferential job know to look at the full job? I didnt set it up in backup exec to know about the full job."

The differential job doesn't know anything about the full job - it doesn't need to. It knows what to backup based on the archive bits on the files in the selection list.
The full backup will backup all files in the selection list regardless of the archive bit, and reset the archive bit. The differential backup will backup all files in the selection list which have the archive bit set, but will not reset the archive bit.

http://www.BackupExecFAQ.com

 

[customgt]

Ive got a good grip on this now.
It is so much better doing a full email backup at noon saturday, then a differential mon night - thur night.
I then do a full backup mon-friday night of the public store and of files.

Although Im using a 500gb drive to do this and the full public/file backup is 200gb..i need to setup differential tommorrow.

One thing that is cool to watch is how big your differentials grow. Its amazing thier is that much email coming in and our company is just a small business.

I set the backup files to 1gb each. I notice that after one is full, it looks at everyone and sets a locker file to each one as it browses thru them. Once it finds the last one to append to i hear it beep then it starts to write to that backup file. It does this over and over, very strange....and time consuming I imagine.

 

[abostonma7]

Hey buddy,
Why is your backup job setup so complicated? For example, we run diff.backup m-thursday, and a full backup every friday.I think this would work for you

 

[customgt]

Well a long time ago i was doing Full backups everyday.
The full backup included everything, email and files.
Of course that was taking forever, so I figured maybe that big of job was hogging resources, so I broke it down into private store and everything else.
That did backup everything faster.

But now that I am doing Diff M-TH I imagine I could just combine the jobs then combine the fulls into the Friday Full job....hmmm...

I think that I will set this up this week.
Thanks

 

[CompWizard2]

...how do these 2 jobs know they belong to the same data?"

Every backup job uses a selection list, a defined set of files to be backed up. Many jobs can use the same selection list. A diffy backup job does not *have* to use the same selection list as a full backup job, but I highly discourage that as it would be really confusing. Just use the same one.

BackupExec knows which files have changed based on one of two methods, (your choice set in the job properties), either by the archive bit or by the time/date stamp of the file. I use the former. I think there may be some 'gotchas' with the latter, but I won't confuse this topic with that info.