Continuous Delta Backup

Less than one month after our first release of XenServer incremental backup, we made a major improvement inside Xen Orchestra: Continuous Delta Backup. And we are very happy to present you this exclusive feature on XenServer!

It means to backup by exporting full disks once for all. Indeed, after this initial export, we'll manage to only use delta blocks forever.

Benefits are huge for all your XenServer backup:

  • fast backup process
  • low bandwidth usage
  • low disk usage on the backup storage
  • same level of protection
  • no agent to install on your hosts (works out of the box!)

And you can even imagine to use this to backup more often! Because delta will be smaller, and will be always delta's.

Want to know how? The secret is offline merging:

For those who wondered, yes, it's similar to the "Forever Forward Incremental Backup" from VEEAM, but in this case it works for XenServer.

How it works

Nothing changes in the UI: you create a Delta backup job with a configured retention. Example: a job with a retention of 7:

And next, when we got the eighth backup, we won't re-export the full disks. We'll merge the older delta in the full disk, like this:

You can see that we also added the last delta on Sunday

Now we got merged those two, we can remove the older delta:

The full disk is now the backup of last Monday. That's it!