fbackup levels 1-9

[Belinda Dermody]

Could some explain to me in laymans terms, the difference between level 1-9. I know that level 0 does a complete backup. I have been doing level 0 for years, but time constraint and going into multi tapes, I am going to start doing levels, but I need to know what each number represents. I still want to do a complete 0 twice a week.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

This is not complicated at all:

A Full backup (level 0) would backup everything.
A Level 1 backup would then backup only those files since the last level 0.
Level 2 backups would get those files modified since the last level 1 backup. -- and so on.

You may find that you want to use only full and level 1 backups since that would require at most two tapes for the restore.

The tradeoff to going to higher levels of incrementals is that the backups are faster (because there is less to do) but the restores require most steps.

If you man fbackup, it gives a pretty good explanation of this.

[Victor_5]

Simply to say,
0 for full backup
1-9 for incremental backup, level n bases on level n-1

man fbackup for details.

[Jon Mattatall]

That's exactly it, 0 is full, and 1 would only backup those files changed since the last 0 backup.

The change will make one significant change - remember that to restore, the last level 0 AND the latest level 1 backups have to be restored....

ie Monday --- 0
Tu --- 1
We --- 1
Th ---- 1
Fri --- BOOM

You need to restore Monday, then Thursday's tapes to get back the most recent data.

Some will do a 0, then 1, then 2, and so on, which reduces backup time, but a restore means ALL the tapes since the last 0 are needed. If you're going to do full backups twice a week, 0 and 1 should be fine.

Jon