Incremental forever backup scenario

An example of how to define a daily incremental forever incremental backup of the VMs.

About this task

Scheduling daily incremental forever backups ensures that there are frequent backups of the VMs and reduces the size of each backup.

Procedure

  1. From the VMware guests, update the Tivoli® Storage Manager client backup-archive client options file:
    • Windows operating systemsSpecify these options in the dsm.opt options file.
    • Linux operating systemsSpecify these options in the dsm.sys file, in the stanza for the data mover node.
    1. Enable compression by adding the following option: compression yes.
      Tip: You can only enable compression if you are using client deduplication and if deduplication has been enabled for the storage pool.
    2. Enable deduplication by adding the following option: deduplication yes.
    3. Modify the trigger values for megablock refreshes by adding one of the following options:
      mbobjrefreshthresh
      or
      mbpctrefreshthresh


      Ensure that you specify the appropriate values for your environment.
  2. Define an incremental forever incremental backup for each of the VMware guests.

Results

The blocks that changed since the previous backup (full or incremental) are now backed up. The most recent incremental is appended to the previous backup. If a full backup does not exist for the VMs, a full backup is performed. Incremental forever incremental backups are run according to schedule repetition.