Is there a way to backup just the changes made in a large file?

[mtt sys admin]

Before I ask my question let me give you a little background on what I am backing up. I am backing up users email data. Primarily the users use outlook express. Which stores emails in a .dbx configuration file. For example, if a user has a folder called inbox when they open up outlook express, also on ther pc the user has a configuration file called inbox.dbx. Accordingly if the size of the email data in the users inbox is 250 MB then inbox.dbx should also be 250 MB. So that's that. After a full backup on Friday I am backing up incrementally on Monday through Thursday. So using my previous example lets say this particular user gets 1 MB worth of data on Monday or adds 1 more MB of emails to their inbox. The users inbox.dbx is now 251 MB. Retrospect seeing the file as modified copies the whole 251 MB file to the New Member bacup set becuase it saw the file as changed or modified, which makes sense because it did change. Now I have 501 MB of backup data in the backup set even though only 1 MB has really changed or been modified. My question is can Retrospect or is it possible with Retrospect to reduce Monday's backup to backing up only the change within the file (1 MB)? if any one know if this is possible please let me know.

 

mtt

[rhwalker]

Not possible with Retrospect. Only solution that I can think of would be to use a different MUA (email client) that uses a different mailbox format (e.g., mbox).

 

Russ

[mtt sys admin]

Is there a script or strategy that can get my backups moving faster without losing reliability,speed, and performance of a proactive backup script? Right now I am using a Proactive Backup script, which does a good job of finding the clients (around 50 with 2 directories being backed up each), and is not that stressful on the network. However, Normal backups still take around 8 to 10 hours because of the email data which can no tbe backed up at the byte level. I attempted to use 5 seperate scripts with 5 seperate backup sets and run them at the same time so they would run concurrently thinking that the backups would run faster and cause less stress on the network trafficv but what I found happened was 2 things the speed and performance which I thought would be improved was actually worse(the drain on the network was so bad users were complaing of the slowness of the speed when they vpn'd in that night which never occured running a proactive backup), and secondly, the reliablility was less forgiving in finding backup clients and making sure they were backed up that I had more errors not finding clients and clients being skipped then previously with any proactive backup. I have thought about making 50 seperate scripts with 50 spererate backup sets and running them parrallelly, but I am not so sure that this would be better for performance, speed, and reliability after seeing what a mess automated scripts that were not proactive were.

[dthede]

Speaking strategically, isn't the preferred approach here to use Exchange Server for Outlook? I'm not an Outlook user, but I believe that the concept and intention of the extra-option backup capabilities for both Retrospect and Veritas (and probably other backup softwares) is precisely to enable users to effectively backup the changes in database-type files, such as Oracle, Exchange, MS-SQL, etc.

 

So the answer, conceptually, is that of course there's a way to achieve what you want....just not from where you are. I'd expect that it is precisely this data management headache you're facing that is the motivating force for moving to a proper email system, databased in a standard way and offering slick backup protection.