Differential Backups and Scheduling - check my understanding

[DanielUK]

OK, I have a couple of win2k servers that I'm making use of ntbackup. I had decided on:

1. Full backup on Friday
2. Differentials on Monday - Thurs

so I created two schedules:

Schedule 1. a weekly full backup on Fridays
Schedule 2. a weekly differential backup to run on Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs.

I'm having difficulty getting my head around the differentials schedule and the append or overwrite selections.

It is my understanding that If I choose overwrite, it creates and overwrites the same filename each time the schedule is run.

Alternately, if I choose append, it appends each differential as separate entities within the one backup file which clearly grows until it fills up the backup drive!

Am I correct with this so far?

I'm concerned with the growth of a single appended differential backup and the lack of redundancy with a daily overwritten file. For redundancy purposes I was hoping to have separate backup files for each of the days so:

1. Monday's differential backup e.g. MondayDifferential.bkf
2. Tuesday's differential backup e.g. TuesdayDifferential.bkf
3. Wednesday's differential backup e.g. WednesdayDifferential.bkf
4. Thursday's differential backup e.g. ThursdayDifferential.bkf

So I could easily copy a reasonably sized previous day's differential to an external hard drive each morning. Am I correct in saying that, if I wanted to do this, I would need a separate schedule to run a differential for each day?

Hope that makes sense.

Dan

 

[karlisi]

I have small network with schedule - every Monday full backup, every Tue, Wen, Thu, Fri differential backups. It is made by one schedule and some batch scripting, where backup files are named by backup type and date they are made. But You can make separate schedules for every day, perhaps it can be more preferable if there will be need to change schedule settings for some days.

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Karlis
ECDL; MCSA