Commvault provides seamless and efficient backup and restore of data and information in the enterprise from most mainstream operating systems, databases, and applications. The backup and recovery system uses agents to interface with file systems and applications to facilitate the transfer of data from production systems to the protected environment. There are several types of data protection available.
Full Backup
Backups for any client start with a full backup. For Agents that support non-full backups, the full backup becomes a baseline to which subsequent backup types are applied. For example, if an agent supports incremental backups, a full backup must be performed before an incremental backup can be initiated.
For more information, see Full Backups.
Incremental Backup
An incremental backup contains only data that is new or has changed since the last backup, regardless of the type. On average, incremental backups consume far less media and place less of a burden on resources than full backups.
For more information, see Incremental Backups.
Differential Backup
A differential backup contains only the data that is new or has changed since the last full backup. Like incremental backups, differential backups, on average, consume less media and place less of a burden on resources than full backups.
For more information, see Differential Backups.
Synthetic Full Backup
Synthetic full backups consolidate the data from the latest full backup or synthetic full backup together with any subsequent incremental backups into one archive file, instead of reading and backing up data directly from the client computer. Since synthetic full backups do not back up data from the client computer, this operation imposes no load on the client computer.
For more information, see Synthetic Full Backups.
Selective Online Full Backup
For certain databases, a selective online full backup is a full backup that you perform when the database is online. A selective copy subclient includes the data, logs and control file. The backup is copied to a selective copy during the auxiliary copy operation, and you can restore it from the copy.
For more information, see Selective Online Full Backups.
Block-Level Backup
Block-level backups integrate snapshot technology with efficient block storage mechanisms to speed up backups.
For more information, see Block-Level Backups.