Delta-Only Full Backups on External Drives

[Michael Williams]

Hi,

I am moving from Bacula to Bareos and I'm taking the opportunity to update and refine my configuration (and also make sure I'm making the most of the Bareos specific features).

I'm currently backing up to removable drives (RDX cartridges in this case). I want to have a full copy of all of my data on each drive so that as long as I have on drive, I have virtually everything (other than what's changed since I ran that backup). My rate of change is very low, so the data doesn't change much from backup to backup. Currently I'm just running "Full" backup jobs, which of course re-copies every file on every backup. This achieves the goal, but it isn't very efficient and takes multiple hours to get through the backup.

What I'd ideally like to do is have Bareos work out what's changed and then effectively update the existing full-backup on the drive (assuming a full backup had already been completed on that drive) with the limited number of changes.

Is this possible? If so, how? If not, what would be the next best choice to achieve what I'm looking for?

As an aside, is there some documentation on the description and behaviour of the different backup levels (Full, Incremental, etc)? I tried to find this but couldn't seem to locate it.

Your help and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Michael