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Managing ntbackup files
I have a file server running Windows Server 2003 R2 and I use the Windows ntbackup utility to perform my backups. I run a full backup every Sunday and incremental backups on the other days.
Recently, my incremental file has blown up to 1.5TB in size (no that's not a typo, I meant terabyte). I am backing up all of my user's folders (225 users in all who each have a disk quota of 3GB). Interestingly, my full backup file (named full.bkf) is only 208GB in size. When I open the incremental file in the ntbackup utility it displays 207 sets of backups that started in May of 2011. My concern is that my backup device is running out of space because it only has a drive limit of 2 TBs.
Here are my questions:
Is there a way to have the ntbackup limit the number of sets it creates? For example, I only want to keep the last 6 months of incremental sets. Can ntbackup be setup to do this?
Can I manually delete sets within a catalog? If so, how? If I manually delete older sets, will that affect the newly created ones in any way?
Can you recommend any software that will manage and quickly search extremely large backup (.bkf) files?
Thanks
Recently, my incremental file has blown up to 1.5TB in size (no that's not a typo, I meant terabyte). I am backing up all of my user's folders (225 users in all who each have a disk quota of 3GB). Interestingly, my full backup file (named full.bkf) is only 208GB in size. When I open the incremental file in the ntbackup utility it displays 207 sets of backups that started in May of 2011. My concern is that my backup device is running out of space because it only has a drive limit of 2 TBs.
Here are my questions:
Is there a way to have the ntbackup limit the number of sets it creates? For example, I only want to keep the last 6 months of incremental sets. Can ntbackup be setup to do this?
Can I manually delete sets within a catalog? If so, how? If I manually delete older sets, will that affect the newly created ones in any way?
Can you recommend any software that will manage and quickly search extremely large backup (.bkf) files?
Thanks
Rodney Barnhardt
One questions, do you have your backup also backing up the folder where all of these files are located? If so, that is the reason your backups have gotten so large.
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ASKER
No, my backup files are located on a 2TB storage device connected to my file server via USB 2.0. I am upgrading to a 3 to 4 TB NAS today to buy my time until I can actually buy a real backup solution this summer when our fiscal year starts again. I wasn't sure if I was missing some configuration settings within ntbackup to help manage the size of my backup files.
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