By Florentina Stirbu
Vault incremental backups can be very useful for bigger Vaults that take a long time to backup. These will only save changes made in the Vault since the last full backup or the previous incremental. Usually, a full backup is taken once a week with incremental back ups scheduled daily.
The standard procedure for restoring an incremental backup is to restore the full backup first, then all incremental backups in the order in which they were taken. An Autodesk article on this topic can be found here.
However, when a set of backups (a full backup + at least one incremental backup) needs to be restored into a different ADMS console, which is on a newer version, this Restore process won’t work. The destination Vault server can be on the same year release, but have a newer update installed than the server where the backup was taken from or be on a newer release altogether.
Both scenarios imply a database migration – restoring the full backup from the ADMS console or from the command line will make the server ineligible for an incremental Restore:
Attempting to restore the incremental backups after the full backup has been restored and migrated will result in the following error:
There is an alternative restore process which will restore the entire backup set, in a single restore operation. The Restore should be done using the Full Restore option, but instead of selecting the full backup, the directory to restore should be the one corresponding to the latest incremental backup.
The key requirement is that all incremental and full backups must be under the same top-level folder. The restore process will first restore the chosen (most recent) incremental backup, then any other incrementals in reverse order and the full backup last.
Incremental backups can be restored using this method even if migration is not required.