Incremental-only backup

The incremental-only approach to backup makes a single full backup copy and thereafter makes incremental backup copies to capture newly written data. If synthetic full tapes are not made, this approach leads to horrendously long and troublesome restores because every tape that was ever made might be needed for recovery. This implies copies need to be made of every tape in case they fail and also requires them to be stored in different locations, which means it might be necessary to have multiple copies at each location to account for media failures and so on and so forth. (It’s funny what disaster paranoia will lead you to think about.)

That’s why backup vendors developed disk-based, incremental-only backup systems that automatically copy backup data from a backup system at one site to another system at a remote location. When a disaster happens at the primary site, a full recovery can be made at the remote site from backup data in the remote system.

Incremental-only backup solutions integrate database, replication, and backup software along with the redundant hardware systems and facilities overhead at the remote site. Like other disk-based backup systems, they have capacity limitations that restrict the amount of backup data that can be kept, requiring management diligence and planning. Incremental-only backup systems are effective for solving backup problems, but, if the IT team also wants to reduce the cost of storage, incremental-only systems probably don’t fit the bill.

Source of Information : Rethinking Enterprise Storage