Explanation of Incremental backups with Vault

Autodesk Support

Nov 2, 2018

Products and versions covered

Issue:

What is the difference between an Incremental Backup and a full backup from Autodesk Vault Server?

Solution:

An Incremental backups, can only be taken if a full backup has already been taken. They are useful if the time taken for a full backup becomes too long.

One backup strategy could be to take a full backup on a Friday, then take incremental backups on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The full backup will take the normal amount of time. The Incremental backup on the Monday would be just the changes made since the full backup on the Friday. So it will be faster than a full backup. The Tuesday Incremental backup will again be faster than a full backup, and just the changes since Mondays Incremental backup and so on.

If there was a catastrophic failure on a Friday, that required a restore of those backups, you would need to first restore Fridays full backup, then the incremental backups from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, in the correct order.

Incremental Backup
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Full Backup
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So, although it saves time taking the backups on a daily basis, it can be more complicated, time consuming and labour intensive to restore Incremental backup, than taking a full backup every day.

Note: Incremental backups are only a feature of Vault Professional.

Products:

Vault Basic; Vault Professional; Vault Workgroup;

Versions:

2017; 2013; 2014; 2015; 2016; 2019; 2018;

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