Active Backup for Business - can it do incremental backups ?

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Active Backup for Business - can it do incremental backups ?

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DS920+
I have searched all over for this but found nothing... I just started running Active Backup for Business on my DS-920+. After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC. Can anyone point me to how to make subsequent backups as incremental ?
 


I'm sure there's a Synology link somewhere, but I only see their ABB for VMs guide.
 
Last edited:
Thanks Telos.

For anyone else who has this question, the PDF manual for ABB that Telos so kindly linked about, on Page 11 advises to ensure that your Windows PC has the Volume Shadow Copy service turned on. Mine was off and set to "Manual". I have now set it to Automatic and started the service. I just ran a backup and it was super fast. I see that same large file is present in the new directory but I'm now guessing that it's just a link to the original full backup. I'm sure there are several technical issues above my technical pay grade but I'm confident that it's all doing what it's supposed to. Many thanks.

Edit : there are additional sections within the PDF manual on setting up ABB for your Windows PC (P.26) and on Restoring your PC data ( P. 58)
 
After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC
This confused me. The default ABB shared folder isn't accessible to normal users, or even new administrator users, by default. That would suggest you are using the default 'admin' user to access the NAS so I suggest you create a new account and assign it to the Administrators group. Then disable the default 'admin' as it's well known and will be the focus of any attack. Also run the Security Advisor in DSM, and have a look at this...

Back to the ABB default shared folder: if you looked in folder 'ActiveBackupData' and then dug down to a specific backup folder did you see a '0.img' file in each one and it was GBs every time? This is a virtual image file and actually takes very little storage space... certainly not the 100's of GBs it claims each image needs.

If you look in '@ActiveBackup' and find the same subfolder you will see a '0.img.delta' file instead and that has a much smaller size.


Still, thanks to @Telos I hadn't enabled Volume Shadow Copy service, wasn't aware of it (Windows used under duress) but trying it now. Prior to this the backups from PC to ABB server have been incremental, a few GB, except if a backup session ends up getting cancelled and then it often likes to do a full backup to be sure it hasn't missed something. Hoping VSC will help here.

Good question :) I've learnt something useful.
 
fredbert...

I have already done as you suggest regarding disabling the old admin account and creating a new one with admin privileges.

Yes, I do see those image files. What you are saying regarding their true size makes complete sense. After thinking about this whole thing for a while yesterday, that became my suspicion but you confirmed it and explained it perfectly. Many thanks.
 
I have searched all over for this but found nothing... I just started running Active Backup for Business on my DS-920+. After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC. Can anyone point me to how to make subsequent backups as incremental ?

I have searched all over for this but found nothing... I just started running Active Backup for Business on my DS-920+. After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC. Can anyone point me to how to make subsequent backups as incremental ?
Yes through forever incremental. enable VSS on windows device and schedule your ABB backups. first backup will be full automatically. other following backups shall be incremental
 
I have searched all over for this but found nothing... I just started running Active Backup for Business on my DS-920+. After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC. Can anyone point me to how to make subsequent backups as incremental ?

Check out Deduplication and Versions. Together they are your answer, they improve upon and replace incremental.

With deduplication, the file exists one time, but can be seen/applied from many ways. Assume Entire device backups of three identical computers all running the same lock screen background. With deduplication, there is only one copy of the lock screen background file taking up storage space, but all three devices can be restored from it and it will show as being there for each device. Incremental would have saved three copies of this file, one for each machine. The only real issue with this is that File Station does not properly report space actually taken by files that are deduplicated, it shows the size as if all three files were present when only one is. ABfB shows the actual space and the approximate reduction ratio.

With versions, the file exists in it's original form plus the changes, versus incremental having the original, then replacing it with rev-1, then replacing it again with rev-2, etc., each time replacing the whole file. Say you have a file with 80-lines of data and 2-weeks after backing it up you change line-14 of that file. With incremental, the old file is overwritten with the new file. But what if you need the old file with the original line-14? Unless you have multiple backups going back far enough to grab it you're out of luck.

7
 
I have searched all over for this but found nothing... I just started running Active Backup for Business on my DS-920+. After reviewing the folders and contents of the backups with Windows explorer, every backup appears appears to be a complete backup of my PC. Can anyone point me to how to make subsequent backups as incremental ?
Yes, it does do an incremental backup, I have many workstations backing up M~F, and in the notification emails it does have the amount of backed up data, it's usually about 3~6Gb for each machine at my office. If I see a large backup I look a the workstations to figure out why since our users are supposed to save all documents on the file server, not on their workstations. Unfortunately, I don't know where to point you to the written answer within Synology documentation.
 

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