NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Rsynch backup --0 Differential versus Incremental
Back in the ‘old’ days backups used to have Incremental and Differential methods of backing up information. Historically these differences came about because of devices called tape drives and the as...
FWIW, tape drives are still in use - though generally not as the primary backup medium. Tape is cheaper than cloud or disk backup, and has an inherent "air gap" that is useful when protecting from ransomware.
Digital999 wrote:
My question is how do I parameterize the Netgear GUI for a Rsync backup to start a ‘new’ base backup after a given number of differential backups?
The second question is if I switch between Incremental to Differential will that trigger a ‘new’ base level backup process? If not how do I make sure that the next occurrence is a base level backup?
You can't. The GUI doesn't support differential backups at all. It also doesn't support incremental backups as you describe them. So the second question doesn't apply.
In a ReadyNAS backup job, an incremental backup simply updates the destination folder incrementally. Files that are newer or changed are updated, the files that aren't newer and appear unchanged are not updated. At the end of the process, you end up with a complete copy of the source in the destination folder.
The modes are you describing operate very differently. Sometimes these backup modes are called "versioned" backups. You'd have one folder for that last full backup. Then a different folder for each differential backup or incremental backup. Those folders would only include the changes from the full backup (in the case of differential) or the last backup (in the case of increment) - they would not be complete copies of the source folder.
You can get something similar (though not identical) if you enable snapshots on the source share (or the destination share if you are backing up to another ReadyNAS) - then the snapshots let you access previous versions of the files and folders. But to do exactly what you'd want would require that you create your own backup scripts - it's not something you can do with the GUI.
Digital999 wrote:
The third question is selecting the backup time. My systems show selected times via a drop-down menu but there is no apparent way to change that time to something other than the drop down value. What am I missing here?
This is a bit confusing, and IMO the "to" time is a bit broken - it's not really clear how it applies.
But you are limited to the choices in the two pull-down lists.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
