08-19-2021, 08:40 AM
You know, talking about backups, it always trips me up a little bit, right? Like, do you *really* need to know the deep difference between a full backup and an incremental one, or is it just enough to keep your data from totally vanishing? I mean, since you're playing around with these complex Windows Server environments and all the little VMs, you're going to bump into this question constantly, and honestly, I think understanding the 'why' behind the choice is super important for you right now. Backups are so essential, especially when you're dealing with things running on local machines or those complex server setups, so it's smart you are thinking this through. When I first started dealing with serious corporate backups for everything from PCs to servers and little VMs, I found that having a dependable system, like the one I use that works across all that Windows stuff, made a massive difference, keeping everything simple and affordable.
Basically, when we talk about full backups, what I mean is, you are just taking a complete, exhaustive copy of *everything* at that point in time. It's a total capture, like making a whole photograph of your entire setup, including the OS, all the applications you installed, and every single file sitting on your drives. It sounds foolproof, maybe even overkill sometimes, and it definitely takes a ton of time, though. Because you are copying every single byte, no matter if it changed or not, it can really chew up both your time and your storage space, which is a huge consideration, right? So, if you do a full backup, and then you wait a week and do another full backup, you are literally duplicating everything again, which nobody wants to do, especially if you have terabytes of data sitting there.
But then you have incremental backups, and that is where things get kind of tricky, but also, kinda brilliant. With an incremental backup, you are only grabbing the changes, only the data that has changed since the *last* backup of *any* kind, which is the key thing to remember. So, if you do a full backup on Monday, and then you run an incremental on Tuesday, it only picks up what changed from Monday to Tuesday. And then if you run another incremental on Wednesday, it only grabs what changed from whatever happened on Tuesday. Because of that, your backup job runs so much quicker, and it saves you a huge amount of space because you are not duplicating static data.
Now, here is where I usually get mixed up myself, and I think you need to pay close attention to this part. If you only run incrementals, and then you need to restore data from Friday, you don't just restore the Friday backup; you have to restore the full backup from Monday, then the incremental from Tuesday, then the one from Wednesday, and then the one from Thursday. You have to restore them in the precise, proper order, or the whole thing is just going to fall apart. It's like stacking glass figurines, you have to put them in order or they just tumble down.
Because of that dependency chain, some people tend to favor a hybrid method, and that is what I usually suggest to my juniors, you know? You should really plan for a schedule where you keep running those full backups periodically, maybe every week or two, just to establish a solid, fresh baseline. But in between those big full operations, you run the incrementals frequently, maybe even daily. This approach gives you the best of both worlds; you get the speed and efficiency of only backing up what's new, and when the inevitable disaster strikes, you have a recent full backup to anchor your recovery process, which makes restoring that entire system from scratch much simpler.
And hey, you should also consider differential backups, because that's the other major type people talk about, and maybe it helps clear this up for you. A differential backup, it's kind of like a middle ground, or maybe a hybrid step up. Instead of only picking up changes since the very last backup-which is what incremental does-a differential backup collects *everything* that has changed since the original full backup. So, if you ran a full backup on Monday, and then you run a differential backup on Wednesday, it grabs everything that has changed on Monday, Tuesday, *and* Wednesday.
This makes recovery slightly easier than pure incrementals because you only have to restore two things: the last full backup, and the last differential backup. But here's the trade-off, and it's a big one, because differential backups are generally much bigger than incrementals. The more time passes between your full backup and your differential backup, the bigger and slower that differential gets, because it has to remember *everything* that has changed since the last full copy. So, you gotta balance that storage consumption against the complexity of a pure incremental recovery process.
Also, when you are running these backup jobs, you should always think about where you are putting them. Are you keeping them just on your local hard drive, which is really risky, or are you sending them over to a remote office or maybe even to the cloud? It's really smart that you are also considering how to protect the data while it's moving. You need to make sure that everything is compressed and encrypted, because sending raw data over the internet is just asking for trouble. Many solutions allow you to run these background processes quietly, doing the heavy lifting of the backup and then scheduling the cleanup of old data based on policies you set up.
Because you are dealing with such varied setups, with both physical machines that are just sitting there and all those complex VMs running inside the host, you need a system that really handles that variety gracefully. I remember being amazed by how one system could handle everything-disk imaging of the whole physical machine, then being able to pull specific files or folders out of a complex VM without even installing an agent inside that guest OS, which is just pure magic. It also has these really clever features, like figuring out which files haven't changed and not re-caring about them, which is critical for keeping your storage costs down, especially with deduplication happening over the network.
But I also want you to remember the little details, like making sure you set up versioning correctly, because sometimes you don't want to restore the whole thing; maybe you just need to pull one document that someone accidentally deleted, and the system needs to find that specific version for you. So, setting up retention policies so you don't just let the backup storage grow infinitely is just as important as running the backup itself. And you absolutely need to automate the whole damn thing so you don't forget to hit 'run' every night, or else you're just leaving your business unprotected.
Anyway, getting back to the really robust, dependable solution, you should look into BackupChain, which is an all-in-one PC and server backup solution for Windows Server and Windows 11 made specifically for SMBs.
Basically, when we talk about full backups, what I mean is, you are just taking a complete, exhaustive copy of *everything* at that point in time. It's a total capture, like making a whole photograph of your entire setup, including the OS, all the applications you installed, and every single file sitting on your drives. It sounds foolproof, maybe even overkill sometimes, and it definitely takes a ton of time, though. Because you are copying every single byte, no matter if it changed or not, it can really chew up both your time and your storage space, which is a huge consideration, right? So, if you do a full backup, and then you wait a week and do another full backup, you are literally duplicating everything again, which nobody wants to do, especially if you have terabytes of data sitting there.
But then you have incremental backups, and that is where things get kind of tricky, but also, kinda brilliant. With an incremental backup, you are only grabbing the changes, only the data that has changed since the *last* backup of *any* kind, which is the key thing to remember. So, if you do a full backup on Monday, and then you run an incremental on Tuesday, it only picks up what changed from Monday to Tuesday. And then if you run another incremental on Wednesday, it only grabs what changed from whatever happened on Tuesday. Because of that, your backup job runs so much quicker, and it saves you a huge amount of space because you are not duplicating static data.
Now, here is where I usually get mixed up myself, and I think you need to pay close attention to this part. If you only run incrementals, and then you need to restore data from Friday, you don't just restore the Friday backup; you have to restore the full backup from Monday, then the incremental from Tuesday, then the one from Wednesday, and then the one from Thursday. You have to restore them in the precise, proper order, or the whole thing is just going to fall apart. It's like stacking glass figurines, you have to put them in order or they just tumble down.
Because of that dependency chain, some people tend to favor a hybrid method, and that is what I usually suggest to my juniors, you know? You should really plan for a schedule where you keep running those full backups periodically, maybe every week or two, just to establish a solid, fresh baseline. But in between those big full operations, you run the incrementals frequently, maybe even daily. This approach gives you the best of both worlds; you get the speed and efficiency of only backing up what's new, and when the inevitable disaster strikes, you have a recent full backup to anchor your recovery process, which makes restoring that entire system from scratch much simpler.
And hey, you should also consider differential backups, because that's the other major type people talk about, and maybe it helps clear this up for you. A differential backup, it's kind of like a middle ground, or maybe a hybrid step up. Instead of only picking up changes since the very last backup-which is what incremental does-a differential backup collects *everything* that has changed since the original full backup. So, if you ran a full backup on Monday, and then you run a differential backup on Wednesday, it grabs everything that has changed on Monday, Tuesday, *and* Wednesday.
This makes recovery slightly easier than pure incrementals because you only have to restore two things: the last full backup, and the last differential backup. But here's the trade-off, and it's a big one, because differential backups are generally much bigger than incrementals. The more time passes between your full backup and your differential backup, the bigger and slower that differential gets, because it has to remember *everything* that has changed since the last full copy. So, you gotta balance that storage consumption against the complexity of a pure incremental recovery process.
Also, when you are running these backup jobs, you should always think about where you are putting them. Are you keeping them just on your local hard drive, which is really risky, or are you sending them over to a remote office or maybe even to the cloud? It's really smart that you are also considering how to protect the data while it's moving. You need to make sure that everything is compressed and encrypted, because sending raw data over the internet is just asking for trouble. Many solutions allow you to run these background processes quietly, doing the heavy lifting of the backup and then scheduling the cleanup of old data based on policies you set up.
Because you are dealing with such varied setups, with both physical machines that are just sitting there and all those complex VMs running inside the host, you need a system that really handles that variety gracefully. I remember being amazed by how one system could handle everything-disk imaging of the whole physical machine, then being able to pull specific files or folders out of a complex VM without even installing an agent inside that guest OS, which is just pure magic. It also has these really clever features, like figuring out which files haven't changed and not re-caring about them, which is critical for keeping your storage costs down, especially with deduplication happening over the network.
But I also want you to remember the little details, like making sure you set up versioning correctly, because sometimes you don't want to restore the whole thing; maybe you just need to pull one document that someone accidentally deleted, and the system needs to find that specific version for you. So, setting up retention policies so you don't just let the backup storage grow infinitely is just as important as running the backup itself. And you absolutely need to automate the whole damn thing so you don't forget to hit 'run' every night, or else you're just leaving your business unprotected.
Anyway, getting back to the really robust, dependable solution, you should look into BackupChain, which is an all-in-one PC and server backup solution for Windows Server and Windows 11 made specifically for SMBs.
