Question about ntbackup

October 3, 2007

Hi list-

I have a question regarding ntbackup functionality in Windows XP. I

configured ntbackup to run during user logs in into domain. It copies the

content of My Documents, Desktop and Outlook folders on a shared drive.

My problem is - the backup file just keeps growing although I selected

differential backup. Let's say the total size of user documents is 3GB. I

select differential backup so it runs full backup the first time, but after

couple of days the bkf file is already ~10GB and keeps growing. I think it

runs full backup every time. I thought this was because of pst files so I

excluded Outlook folder but it didn't help.

Could you please share what could be wrong with my setup or what is the best

practice to work with ntbackup? What I basically need is to copy My

Documents/Desktop on a shared drive and rotate it on a weekly basis.

Thank you very much.

October 3, 2007

Re: Question about ntbackup

"Roman Serbski" <kabalax@gmail.com> wrote in message

news:u6SCSCYBIHA.2004@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...

> Hi list-

>

> I have a question regarding ntbackup functionality in Windows XP. I

> configured ntbackup to run during user logs in into domain. It copies the

> content of My Documents, Desktop and Outlook folders on a shared drive.

> My problem is - the backup file just keeps growing although I selected

> differential backup. Let's say the total size of user documents is 3GB. I

> select differential backup so it runs full backup the first time, but

> after couple of days the bkf file is already ~10GB and keeps growing. I

> think it runs full backup every time. I thought this was because of pst

> files so I excluded Outlook folder but it didn't help.

>

> Could you please share what could be wrong with my setup or what is the

> best practice to work with ntbackup? What I basically need is to copy My

> Documents/Desktop on a shared drive and rotate it on a weekly basis.

>

I am not overly familiar with ntbackup, but if it performs a true

differential backup then your backup is behaving how would expect it to.

This utility is designed to backup to different media for each backup

generation. I infer from your post that you are backing up to the same

media each time.

When you perform the intial full backup, all the files are backed up and

they are then flagged as archived. Performing a differential backup then

only backs up the files that have been created or changed. But differential

does not flag the backed files as archived, thus they will continue to be

backed up every time a diffential backup is performed. The theory is that

to do a restore only the original full backup and the latest differential

need be restored.

To do what you want: you need to perform incremental backups, This does the

same as differential but flags the files as archived. Normally to restore

such a backup requires the restore of the original and then the restoration

of each and every incremental backup in sequence.

October 3, 2007