Incremental forever backup strategy

Data Protection for VMware provides a backup strategy called incremental forever. Rather than scheduling weekly (periodic) full backups, this backup solution requires only one initial full backup. Afterward, an ongoing (forever) sequence of incremental backups occurs. The incremental forever backup solution provides these advantages:

• Reduces the amount of data that goes across the network.
• Reduces data growth because all incremental backups contain only the blocks that changed since the previous backup.
• No comparison with the backup target is needed since only changed blocks are identified.
• Minimizes impact to the client system.
• Reduces the length of the backup window.
• No need to schedule an initial full backup as a separate schedule: the first issue of an incremental forever backup automatically defaults to an incremental forever full backup.

In addition, the restore process is optimized, as only the latest versions of blocks that belong to a restored backup are restored. Since the same area on the production disk is recovered only one time, the same block is not written to multiple times as implemented in prior versions of Data Protection for VMware. As a result of these advantages, incremental forever is the preferred backup strategy. However, if your backup solution requires long-term storage or tape retention of your data, consider the tasks described in Periodic full backup strategy.