MSP360 Backup features block-level backup that allows uploading of changed parts of files instead of whole files. This decreases the processing time, time for data upload, and storage space. If you enable block-level backup in MSP360 Backup, the backup plan wizard will suggest you set up an automatic running of a full backup.
This might be necessary for the following reasons:
- The total size of block-level backups outgrows the size of the full backup over time.
- During a recovery from block-level backup, our software will analyze each block, put together only the needed ones, and then recover the data. If there are bazillions of blocks from a yearly backup, the recovery will take significant time.
- To keep the needed number of versions for files. The block-level backup consists of small parts of files, rather than the files. We cannot delete the single block in a row - this will make data unrecoverable. Thus, to delete the old and non-needed version of the file, we need to delete the full backup sequence. Unless a new full backup is done, we won’t delete the old one.
Setting Up Full Backup
MSP360 Backup provides options to run full backup periodically according to a schedule and to force full backup if the total size of all block-level backups is larger than a certain % of the last full backup.
We strongly recommend to specify a schedule for automatic running of a full backup on this wizard page to ensure that the older versions of your files are always available in a storage that uses a block-level backup.
Force Full Backup
We have also added an option to Force Full Backup to the Backup Plans tab so that you can quickly run full backup when necessary.
Further reading Backup Plan: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Your Data
We hope this option helps you keep your storage size more efficient and make the restore process faster. As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
This post applies to MSP360 Backup 2.6.2 and later.
Simple. Reliable.
