Re: What triggers a Full?

Bill Arlofski via Bacula-users <[email protected]> Wed, 05 Mar 2025 22:26:25 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.bacula.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 3/5/25 12:30 PM, John Lockard wrote:
> I have a system which I'm backing up and have it set up for "Always Incremental" backups.  I ran a Full job by hand and have 
> schedules for Differentials and Incrementals, and once a week Bacula will roll up and Incr and Diff jobs greater than 30 days 
> along with the existing Full into a rolling Full backup.  That all seems to be working fine. What happens, occasionally, is 
> Bacula will promote an Incremental backup to a Full Backup. Not to a VirtualFull, an actual Full.  I would assume that 
> something which might cause an Incr to be promoted to Full would be a change in the FileSet.  Like I had /data in my includes 
> and /data/temp in my excludes, and I modified the file to add /data/scratch to the excludes.  Is this assumption correct?
> 
> What I'm not sure about, however, are any other changes which might trigger elevation.
> - Permissions change on the fileset.conf file?
> - Datestamp on the fileset.conf file?
> - other changes to the file unrelated to the fileset, like maybe adding a comment line, or removing a comment line?
> 
> Any thoughts on this, or does someone absolutely have a known list of things which will promote an Incr to Full, or Diff to 
> Full???
> 
> Thanks,
> -John

Hello John,

Bacula will literally tell you why a Diff or Inc was upgraded to a full.

Making changes in an Include/Exclude section of a Fileset (without the `IgnoreFilesetCganes = yes` setting), if you use the 
`MaximumFullInterval = ##` setting in your Job/JobDefs, if you change the Client in the Job, and several other things.

Check the joblog, as well as the job summary at the end of the job's log entries. Bacula will tell you there.

Additionally, some of these things have been added "recently" so if you are using some Bacula version from your distro's 
repos, it may be too old to have these things in the jobs log lines and summary. It is best to be running 15.0.2, the current 
Community version with all up-to-date additions and fixes.


Hope this helps.
Bill

-- 
Bill Arlofski
[email protected]

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