Wow, ok, then perhaps I need to switch to differentials instead. With my graphic design workflow, I routinely have large amounts of files that are moved through a series of folders as they're imported, edited/color-corrected, meta-tagged, contact sheets created, and eventually exported either to web or archive. Incremental backups no longer seem to be a viable solution for me if it means manually restoring not just each day of incrementals, but then manually hunting down potentially hundreds or thousands of individual files which may have been moved between DAY 1, 2, 3, and so on.. Even with only my 7 day backup cycle trying to manually reconcile all those potential moves is ridiculous.
Differentials might be a stop-gap in that it would only require a single full restore and then a single differential but even that presents a lot of manual restoration.
It seems the only other option(s) are:
1. do a single full mirror to the same destination each night, copying over only what's changed during that day, or
2. manually triggering a full backup on days where an unusually large number of files have been moved, or
3. add a second external and use one for a 7-day incremental backup for versioning purposes and the other for a daily mirror for faster restores.
I can't believe every organization out there that does incremental backups, for potentially thousands of users and thousands of TB of data, faces manually hunting down moved files after backups are restored to remove duplicates?! That just doesn't sound right. We're a two-person shop restoring a few terabytes. I can't imagine the lost man-hours for a large organization faced with restoring backups.
Differentials might be a stop-gap in that it would only require a single full restore and then a single differential but even that presents a lot of manual restoration.
It seems the only other option(s) are:
1. do a single full mirror to the same destination each night, copying over only what's changed during that day, or
2. manually triggering a full backup on days where an unusually large number of files have been moved, or
3. add a second external and use one for a 7-day incremental backup for versioning purposes and the other for a daily mirror for faster restores.
I can't believe every organization out there that does incremental backups, for potentially thousands of users and thousands of TB of data, faces manually hunting down moved files after backups are restored to remove duplicates?! That just doesn't sound right. We're a two-person shop restoring a few terabytes. I can't imagine the lost man-hours for a large organization faced with restoring backups.