Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Why won't SBS Backup do Incrementals?

I've been poking around in the community and found that people who are used to backing up are curious as to why they cannot configure incrementals with the SBS backup wizard.

I thought I'd provide a little history here to help make it easy for you. With SBS 2000, we found that a lot of customers (and I'm not pointing my finger at you, the reader) were not doing back-ups at all, and moreover, if people were doing backups, they were of the wrong things!

So naturally we did some field research. Backup was found to be a very complex problem to people, they weren't sure what to backup, they weren't sure if their backups were working or it was just plain too scary to even get involved with.

Voila! The birth of SBS Backup Wizard

After doing more field research, we found that most VAP/VAR type folks have someone onsite change the tape, and having them keep incrementals organized was a pain.

Moreover, as some of you beta testers know, the SBS Backup wizard was not in the Beta2, so given the short timeframe & the overwelming urge to make the wizard simplier than NTBackup, we kept it to full backups only.

And comon, for those of you who actually know what an incremental backup is and can tell the difference between that and a differential backup, aren't you just going to use NTBackup directly?

Now this blog has never been about the future of SBS (since I don't want to walk that fine a line), but as with everything, we'll improve the backup feature set in the upcoming releases of SBS ...

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