Incremental Backup Setup
Full backups every night are slow, expensive, and unnecessary. Incremental backups capture only what changed since the last backup — cutting backup time by 90% and storage costs proportionally. We implement incremental strategies across databases, filesystems, and cloud infrastructure.
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Block-Level Incrementals
Block-level incremental backups track changes at the filesystem or disk level, not file level. Percona XtraBackup uses LSN (Log Sequence Number) tracking for MySQL. pgBackRest uses file manifest comparison and page-level checksums for PostgreSQL. Restic and Borg use content-defined chunking for deduplicated incrementals. The result: a 500GB database with 2% daily churn produces 10GB incremental backups instead of 500GB full backups.
Synthetic Full Backups
Synthetic fulls combine existing incremental backups into a new full backup without reading from the source system. pgBackRest and Veeam support this natively. The benefit: you get the restore simplicity of full backups (single restore operation) without the production impact of running full backups. Weekly synthetic fulls from daily incrementals give you fast restores without ever running a full backup that saturates your network.
Deduplication and Compression
Modern backup tools (Restic, Borg, pgBackRest) include built-in deduplication. Content-defined chunking identifies duplicate blocks across backups and stores them once. Combined with zstd compression (3-5x ratio for database dumps), deduplication typically reduces total storage by 60-80% compared to naive full backup approaches. We configure deduplication with integrity verification to ensure deduplicated data is always restorable.
Restore Chain Management
Incremental backups create restore chains — a full backup plus a sequence of incrementals. Longer chains mean slower restores. We balance chain length against backup performance: maximum 7 incrementals between fulls (or synthetic fulls). Chain integrity is verified on every backup — if an incremental is corrupt, the next backup automatically becomes a differential or full. Restore time is measured as part of weekly verification tests.
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