TS 473 QTS 5.2.6.315
HBS 3.0.210916
I am running a backup between 2 NASs, of a 4Tb folder with DeDupe selected. It’s been running for 9 hours and is only 40% through.
When/if I run it again, does it do a full backup again, or just changes?
Many thanks
First of all selecting dedupe will add a LOT of time particularly in the first backup. If you have version management turned on then subsequent backups will be incremental.
I backup around 13TB between two NAS units on a 10Gbit fiber network and it takes several hours every night. Most of that time is spent scanning the file system looking for changes.
Thanks for this, I don’t use version management at the moment. That’s not to do with the backup, i assume. I’ll have to read up on it.
Well, if you think about it, incremental backups and version management go hand in hand. Incremental backups backup only changed files. The original file is still there in the backup. What if you realize that you don’t need the most recent version of a file that is backed up but a previous version? This has happened to me more than once. The only other way to have multiple versions of your data is to have multiple full backups but that is not space efficient.
NA9D, I still haven’t found how a backup would only backup changed files. Version control seems to be part of QSYNC Central, which I don’t use. If I’m right, yoju have a folder that is sync’d across machines, like OneDrive. I prefer Resilio Sync which just sync’s folders rather than a specific folder. Maybe I’m wrong, but if Version control means QSYNC, I’ll have to look at another solution.
No, HBS and Qsync are completely different.
There are two main types of backup when looking at backup solutions: Full and incremental.
A full backup, backs up the entire content you have selected every single time you run the backup. So if you have 5 TB you want backed up, it backs up the entire 5 TB. This will take quite a bit of time and quite a bit of drive space if you want anything with a history. In some cases, you may want this sort of backup - like sending something to an off-site archive.
An incremental backup will run a full backup the first time it is run. For subsequent backups, it scans the files for changes (likely be looking at the modification dates) and sends only those files to the backup. This is far more space and time efficient because on a given day you may only change megabytes or gigabytes worth of files. 99.9% of files don’t likely change. So now your backup runs in a fraction of the time and the changes add a marginal amount of space to your entire backup.
Now if you are going to backup only changed files, it has to be assumed that you want the keep all the files already in the backup. But what about the files that changed? What do we do with them? Well, generally it is assumed people want to have some sort of “history” so that if they discover they have a corrupted file they can go back and get something from the history.
Let’s say you are looking for a job and you are working on your resume. You then save your changes and overnight your NAS backs up your work. At the same time overnight, your computer crashes, gets hit with malware, etc. Now you need to recover your files which you do. But you realize that when looking at your resume, you accidentally deleted a really important bit of information about one of your previous jobs. If you have version history turned on, you can go back to an earlier version, recover that file and get your work history back. If you don’t have version control turned on, your latest backup is all you have. What you deleted is gone.
I don’t know why someone wouldn’t want version control turned on in a backup. It is such a critical component in making sure you not only have your latest copy of data, but previous copies as well.
Here’s an example of my nightly backup report that ran last night:
NAS Name: NA9D-NAS
Severity: Info
Date/Time: 2025/08/31 02:56:52
App Name: Hybrid Backup Sync
Category: Custom Job Event
Message: [Hybrid Backup Sync] Finished Backup job: "File Backups". Folder Pairs: 14, Total Files: 1913586, Unchanged Files: 1898020, Skipped Files: 0, Backed-up Files: 21, Total File Size: 4.19 TB, Average Transmission Speed: 18.8 KB/s.
So I had 21 files that changed out of 1,913,586 files. Now, I don’t understand why the Total Files - Unchanged Files number doesn’t = 21. I’m sure there’s some reason. But still this ran in a couple hours and backed only what was needed instead of backing up all 4.19TB.
Qsync is a synchronization between your PC/MAC and the NAS. It allows you to have folders that are shared and updated between multiple computers. And you can set it up as well that while you “see” the files on your computer, they are actually kept on the NAS (space saving mode). I use that on my desktop as it’s always connected to the network. But on my laptop, I keep files local as well as on the NAS as I may take my laptop with me where I don’t have connectivity.
This is 100% different than backing up files on the NAS.
Yes I completely understand sync vs backup, but I thought you were saysing that to do a incremental backup, I had to turn on Version Control. As far as I can see, version control is part of Qsync, yes? So if I’m not using Qsync, I don’t get version control?
I can’t see anything within HSB that does incremental backups.
In HBS3, if you create a one-way sync job, then it copies the files initially, then on subsequent runs it only copies anything that has changed, and optionally deletes files from the target that have been removed from the source.
No. While there is a version control in Qsync (I don’t use that), there is version control in Hybrid Backup Sync.
Under Schedule in a backup job in HBS, you have this:
Enabling that is what enables incremental backups.
Thanks, I looked and looked, and probably didn’t see what in front of my eyes!
Here’s an explanation of HBS3 QuDedup backup behavior:
Thanks for the explanation! I assumed that w/o version control checked, it would do a full backup each time. Guess one should not assume! 
Ok, thanks, that sounds great. I’ll await my next scheduled backup an see how long it takes.
Regards
Pete
