Enabling an Incremental Storage Policy

You can create a standard storage policy for all the Full backups and an incremental storage policy for incremental and differential backups. This configuration has following advantages:

• You can reduce the backup window

• You can utilize storage resources efficiently

• You can perform a synthetic full backup using an alternate MediaAgent (one other than the MediaAgent used for the Primary backup).

The illustration in below image demonstrates this configuration.

For example: Subclient A is backed up using a storage policy A. The storage policy A has the incremental storage policy option enabled and Storage policy B is selected as incremental storage policy. Hence, the full backup uses a storage policy A that backs up to a tape library. The incremental and differential backups use a storage policy B that backs up to disk media.

Procedure

1. From the CommCell Browser, expand Policies > Storage Policies.

2. Right-click the appropriate storage policy, and then click Properties.

   The Storage Policy Properties dialog box appears.

3. Select the Incremental Storage Policy check box, to enable the incremental storage policy.

   If you are enabling the incremental storage policy, select a storage policy from the list of storage policies.

   The selected storage policy will be used for performing incremental and differential backups.

   Note

   When you enable an incremental storage policy, add a new virtual machine (VM) to an existing subclient, and execute an incremental backup job, the following process occurs:

   • The parent job becomes an incremental backup.
   • The VM job, now considered a child of the parent, transforms into a full backup.

4. Click OK.

Considerations for File System and Laptop Subclients

Review the following considerations before you configure incremental storage policy retention for file system or Laptop subclients.

• The incremental storage policy retention settings must have a value that is less than or equal to the value specified in the primary storage policy retention settings.

• Do not delete jobs on the primary or incremental storage policies as the deletion might result in data loss.

• Incremental storage policy can only be configured on client computers that use the latest version of indexing.