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kman42 · Feb 12, 2006, 11:37 AM

I have Backup set to backup copies of my wife's account, my account, and my portable's account. The folders of each of these incremental backups is now over 30Gb and I have run out of room on my external drive that I use for backing up. Is there a way to reduce this? Do I need to change my backup strategy?

kman

TETENAL · Feb 12, 2006, 11:50 AM

Each incremental backup is 30 GB? You are generating 30 GB of data a day??? Wow, that's a lot.

Unless you do a lot of video editing I don't think this is correct. What is the majority of the data that is backed up incrementally? Is this really user data? If not, maybe you can exclude it from the backup (like cache files) or exclude it from your regular backup and back it up less regularly/to DVD only or something like that (depends on what it is).

jasong · Feb 12, 2006, 01:42 PM

I had the same problem. Not 30 GB, but ever growing files. One issue is that with a 1 GB mirror image of my iDisk, I had to back up at least 1 GB every time I did an incremental. What I have ended up doing is a mirror backup of my drive once a month, then deleting the incremental job from Backup, deleting the increments, and then creating a new incremental job with a a full backup to begin with.

Yup, it's inelegant, and very un-apple-like, but there you are.

TETENAL · Feb 12, 2006, 02:28 PM

Why didn't you just exclude the iDisk mirror from your backups?

jasong · Feb 12, 2006, 07:33 PM

Because I am not that smart . . .

Anyway, even without iDisk mirror, the fact remains that if you do the quickpick of your settings and address book and bookmarks, it will do a full backup, and then daily incrementals forever. So if in 6 months I want to do a restore to yesterday, I have to restore the full backup from 6 months ago and then all the incrementals for approximately 180 days. When we used Veritas at work, we would have it cycle through and do a full backup once a week and then incrementals for the other 6 days. Backup should have the option to do a new full backup on some kind of schedule so that you don't have 365 and growing incrementals after a year.

TETENAL · Feb 12, 2006, 08:16 PM

Originally Posted by jasong

Backup should have the option to do a new full backup on some kind of schedule so that you don't have 365 and growing incrementals after a year.

I agree with this.

kman42 · Feb 13, 2006, 09:06 AM

Not 30GB/day, 30GB total. It just keeps doing incremental backups and the folders containing all of them keep growing. I don't really need to have access to files I had two months ago; the files from last week would be sufficient.

kman

TETENAL · Feb 13, 2006, 09:47 AM

Originally Posted by kman42

Not 30GB/day, 30GB total. It just keeps doing incremental backups and the folders containing all of them keep growing. I don't really need to have access to files I had two months ago; the files from last week would be sufficient.

Then you need to do Plan->Full Backup once a week and delete the backups prior to this new full backup. As jasong mentioned there is unfortunately no way to do this automatically in Backup.

Toyin · Feb 13, 2006, 03:59 PM

I'm not too crazy about Back-up and the incremental back-up strategy, not only does it take up a ton of room, it failed to correctly restore my personal settings and application preferences after a hard drive failure. I filled a 100gb partition on an external drive by just backing up my home folder (about 60gb). I had to then go through manually 3 months of back ups to pick out the files that I needed. My iDisk back up didn't work properly either.

I've started using Silverkeeper it's free and it creates a mirror image of your drive. It replaces the files that have been changed since your last back up. It can also create a bootable back up drive. You can choose to exclude or include certain folders to make specific (and faster) back ups.