Trouble creating a working differential backup

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Throwaway
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Apr 20, 2017 1:09 pm

Trouble creating a working differential backup

Post by Throwaway »

Hello everyone!

I have a client that uses 2 removable drives and 2 external drives. The external drives do full backups every weekend, alternating between the two. The flash drives should do differential backups every day, alternating between the two. It should then clean out anything from the previous backup.

So it goes:

Friday: Full backup drive 1 (FBD1). (Full backup)
Monday: Take home FBD1, and plug in flash drive 1. (Differential)
Tuesday: Take home flash drive 1 and plug in flash drive 2. (Differential)
Wednesday: Take home flash drive 2 and plug in flash drive 1. (Differential)
Thursday: Take home flash drive 1 and plug in flash drive 2. (Differential)
Friday: Take home flash drive 2 and plug in full backup drive 2. (Full backup)
Repeat.

I am having trouble configuring this in Backup4all. Is this even possible? Since the program recognizes the terabyte drives as external drives, and the 128 GB flash drives as removable drives, you cannot backup to both of the destinations.

Unless you use a network path like \\localhost\d$ to backup to its own D drive. But then the catalog becomes an issue and every differential during the week tries to run a full backup, even though one already ran over the weekend before. I have tried playing with the "Use local catalog" option but it isn't working either.



What is configured right now:

A differential job with:
Cleanup anything older than 6 days on friday
Full backups Friday (after cleanup)
Cleanup Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday anything older than 6 days(before differential)
Differential backups Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday.

Destination - network path: \\localhost\d$

Problem: Differential backup runs a full instead, disregarding the last full backup.

Any ideas?

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1908
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Re: Trouble creating a working differential backup

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

In order for such a scenario to work, the backups on each drive should be independent. Otherwise, when Backup4all will try to delete all previous backup, some of them will be located on the disconnected drive and they won’t be deleted again, filling the drive.

That is why you have to uncheck the “Use local catalogs” option from Backup Properties->Advanced page.

If the drives are differently recognized by Backup4all, you can create two backup jobs, each with its own scheduled task configured to run alternatively every 2 days.

As you will run each job in different days, for one job you can configure the clean and the full backup actions to run on Friday and for the other on Monday.

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