Rotating drives strategy is mostly used when the drives are wiped before every backup.

In your case you would need to mount the correct drives upon each full backup, which is not very convenient. Most of the clients use fresh disks each time to have full copies of the data there.

So you have 2 options

1) Disable block-level option and use full copies of the files(only the files which are changed will be re-uploaded in full)

2) Continue with block-level option and schedule full backups more frequently according to your retention policy.

If it's a file backup plan, the first option would be optimal, since file backup don't get much benefit from block-level mode as much as image-based ones.

Proper GFS mode will be released next year in version 6.0

HI Matt,

Please note that the settings for the rotating drives and regular backup plan are the same except for the Retention policy is set to 5 file versions and not the default 3 on the Regular Backup. I imagine that whether it is called RotatingDrive or any other name for that matter, if the settings are similar then the backup will perform the same?
Please confirm:

In addition, if I have full backed up data on (4) external hard drives with the same backup plans and drive letters that I rotate every week starting with week 1 at the beginning of the month. should I disable the block level type backup in general in the
A: Select backup method,
Or
B: do you mean to disable this in the Full Backup option and Keep the Advanced Mode Block Level Backup in Select Backup Method?
Please confirm: Disable in A Or B?

Goal is to simply backup weekly modified files and do a full backup every 6 weeks.
The full backup takes 5 days, so I do not want to do every week.

Thanks,
Sandra
I am thinking maybe I should have selected simple mode and I don't know with 2.5 tb is this is a good way to go if I want to keep up to date weekly changes?

If you have a lot of small files you need to make the following changes, since block-level mode won't bring any benefits in that case:

And that's basically it. Full backup option will be automatically disabled.

If you have big files(about 1 gig) block-level option would be beneficial and you can leave everything as it is if it's already working for you.

Hi Matt,

Thank you for clarifying where to uncheck the block level options.
It's nice to know that I can modify the Existing block level backup plan after the backup was done, and I do not have to start from scratch with the (4) external hard drives with a new plan.

Please note:
The way it's working now with block level type backup plan does seem to work, and I don't know which way to go now - since we can have small and very large files on any given day?

I just don't want to lose any files big or small. I also do not want to start from scratch since the backups on the (4) external drives were done already with block level type backup and each took about 5 days to complete the backup of 2.5 tb's.


Until the GFS is properly implemented on next release which I think will be a perfect option for given strategy plan of swapping (4) external hard drives from week 1 to week 4, I am not sure if it makes more sense to keep as is and or uncheck full block level option via revising current block level type backups?
What are your thoughts to not lose any files knowing that the block level type backups could have changes from 100mb to 3 gigs on any given day?



Thanks!
Sandra

In my opinion, it would be better to continue with your current setup until version 6.0 is released, since it's already working fine for you.

Perfect!
Thank you!
Sandra