Restoring a incremental backup

[jimmm33]

I am backing up a large directory of images with many subfolders. It is too large to do a full each day so I'm using a incremental Monday - Thursday and a full on Friday.

My question is how do I restore an incremental backup? For example, what is the entire directory gets wiped out and I need to do a restore on everything but the last full was 3 days ago? How do I integrate the most recent incremental data into the last full backup to update it to where it was before the data lose?

[cobian]

See the history tab... Then copy the files back in the reverse order: First the oldest Full backup, then the oldest incremental, then the next older..until the newest. In that case it's easier with a differential backup because only 2 backups are needed to restore: The first FULL backup and the last Differential.

[joaquin73]

Dear Luis Cobian, many thanks for your awesome software.

The restoration of an incremental backup can be done automaticly with a simple MS-DOS command. The blog post "Restore Incremental Cobian Backups – Easily" by Mark Gorey gives full details in the URL:
https://www.urbansouldesign.co.uk/blog/ ... ps-easily/

If you have your backup of folder "Destination" stored in "F:\Archieve\" and you want to restore the files in "Y:\Destination\", then you first have to manually copy first the content of the full (initial) bakup from "F:\Archieve\Destination YYYY-MM-DD (full)" to "Y:\Destination\" (for instance, you can use drag and drop or the clipboard in the File Explorer)

The MS-DOS command that copies the modified files from the incremental directories is:
for /f "delims=" %a in ('dir /b/ad "F:\Archieve\Destination*Inc*" ') do xcopy "F:\Archieve\%a" "Y:\Destination\" /e /y

According to Mark Gorey

This copies the contents of any folders within F:\Archieve\ that starts with “Destination” and has “Inc” (for incremental folders) in it’s name. The asterisks are wildcard characters. The last 2 commands then forces xcopy to overwrite existing files and don’t display warning messages. xcopy will run through and do all this in the date order that the folders were created and provide a single, merged copy of all your backups. That way only newer files overwrite older files. Simple!

Note: For clarity, I have changed the folder names from the original blog post of Mark Gorey in this reply.

Many thanks to Mark Gorey for sharing your tricks and many thanks to Luis Cobian, the generous backup genius, for helping so many people save their data!

[cobian]

Thanks

[AleMore]

Thanks for the answers. How would u go about deleting data then?

Say on day 1 you make a full backup.
On Day 2 you delete some files (not an error, you literally deleted the files on purpose).
On day 3 you make a differential backup.
On day 4 a system failure prompts you to use your backup.

if you copy day full backup, and then day 3 full backup, you will end up with a copy that contains the files you deleted on day 2.

Am I getting this right?

How would u go about this? can u recommend a good reading to know how to use this tools and what to do when things go south?
I am thinking that probably Cobian is the right tool, and probably the workflow around it is something i need to learn more about.

Let me know thanks!