Incremental backups and whatnot

corblimey

I'm using Acronis TrueImage to back up my music collection on a weekly basis to an external h/d. About a month ago, I changed it from a full backup to an incremental backup just so I could fit more on the disk. Am I safe now to remove the files that I don't listen to regularly? What I mean is that if I delete a bunch of files now, and the incremental backup kicks in at the weekend, it's not going to remove those files forever, they'll still be on one of the full or incremental backups. Or am I better off doing 1 final full backup this weekend and then removing what I don't want?

Stephen

You shouldn't do incremental backups forever, cos when the time comes to restore you will need to restore loads of stuff. Most places that use incremental backups would do, say, a full backup at the weekend then incremental every night during the week. That way when you have to do a restore you only need the the backup media since the previous full backup.

corblimey

A daily backup is a little bit overkill for my needs though, although I guess a full backup (with a regularly scheduled clearout) is a better way to go that the incremental one.

Capt'n Midnight

you need three copies to be safe, the third being off-site

if you rely on your external drive then remember there is a failure rate of 1% a year for the first five years, rising drastically after that. And that's not including failures due to dropping or unlpugging with running the safe to remove wizard. Also it's not including real world life times, quantum fireballs had a 50% failure rate to three years due to over heating, IBM disk stars where known as death stars.

Capt'n Midnight

tbh for music files or other data where the files are essentially uncompressible read only files that are never deleted, you might as well use xcopy or robocopy to only copy over the newer files. That way you will have them in a usable format in a second folder, restore is just by copying,

Fair enough there is no indexing, you don't have your files hidden in a backup file in a format that may be unreadable in the future.

corblimey

That's probably a better idea. I've been using syncback these last few months to sync up my videos and my ps3, so i could start doing something similar to that instead of the acronis backups.

When it comes to my music collection, I have the original files, the backup and in a pinch (as has happened before) my ipod. It doesn't have everything on it, but it has enough. I guess I should do something similar for other important files.

With h/d having such a large failure rate, is the theory that you keep everything on 2 external h/d's. When one fails, buy a new one and make another copy. And hope that both don't fail at the same time . I originally used dvd's for my backup purposes, but they seem to be even worse for failure potential than h/ds?