Backing up less data

Incremental backups

Incremental backups enable you to save changes to objects since the last time they were backed up. There are two types of incremental backups: cumulative and changes only. A cumulative backup specifies a backup that includes all changed objects and new objects since the last full backup. This is useful for objects that do not change often, or do not change greatly between the full backups. A changes-only backup includes all changed objects and new objects since the last incremental or full backup.

Incremental backups are especially useful for data that changes frequently. For example, you do a full backup every Saturday night. You have some libraries that are used extensively and you need to back them up more frequently than once a week. You can use incremental backups on the other nights of the week instead of doing a full backup to capture them. This can shorten your backup window while also ensuring that you have a backup of the latest version of those libraries.

Security data and configuration data

You can also reduce planned outages by isolating certain kinds of data and then backing it up separately. Security data includes user profiles, authorization lists, and authority holders. Configuration data includes information about how your system is set up, such as line descriptions, device descriptions, and configuration lists. These types of data are saved as part of a full system backup, but you can also save them separately without having to shut your system down. For details on how to back up these types of data, see Manually saving parts of your system.

Omitting certain items

You can also reduce your backup window by reducing the number of objects you save or preventing objects from being saved more than once. You can do this by choosing to omit certain objects from a backup. For example, you might want to save all user libraries except for temporary libraries. You can choose to omit all temporary libraries from your backup, which will shorten the length of backup processing. Many of the commands that you use to save your system give you the option to omit items from the backup. For details on these commands, see Commands for saving parts of your system and Commands for saving specific object types. You can also use Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) to omit items from a backup.

Data archiving

Any data that is not needed for normal production can be archived and taken offline. It is brought online only when needed, perhaps for month-end or quarter-end processing. The daily backup window is reduced since the archived data is not included.