Incremental Backup Methods
Changed Block Tracking (CBT)
CBT (Changed Block Tracking) is an incremental backup technology built-in in the virtual platforms for a quicker VM incremental backup process and smaller size of backup data. As a result, it can reduce the amount of time incremental backup takes, and also reduces the storage space by saving the new and changed data only.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery now had implemented CBT support for:
VMware vSphere
Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer 7.3 and higher)
XCP-ng
RHV (4.4.7 or newer)
oVirt (4.4.7 or newer)
OLVM (4.4.8 or newer)
Huawei FusionCompute (KVM)
SpeedKit
SpeedKit is a unique feature introduced by Vinchin for high-efficiency VM incremental backups. It is an alternative incremental backup technology to those hypervisors do not have CBT implementations yet. Currently SpeedKit can be used for incremental backups of the following virtual platforms:
MS Hyper-V
Citrix XenServer (version below 7.3)
Red Hat Virtualization (version below 4.4.7)
oVirt (version below 4.4.7)
Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (version below 4.4.8)
Proxmox VE
OpenStack
Sangfor HCI
When SpeedKit is applied to an incremental backup job, there will be a snapshot kept in the datastore for each of the VMs included in the backup job. This is for rapid calculation of the data changes of the VM disks.
Ordinary
Ordinary incremental mode can be used when the virtual platform does not have CBT implementation or users do not want to use SpeedKit as the incremental mode. Ordinary incremental mode will take longer time to calculate the increments of the VM data than CBT and SpeedKit.
Change Incremental Mode
Incremental mode of an existing VM backup job can be changed if required. To change the incremental mode, simply stop and edit the job. In step 3 of the job editing wizard, click on the Advanced Strategy tab, in the Incremental Mode dropdown list, please select another incremental mode then save the modification.
Changing of the incremental mode will result in the next incremental backup downgrade to full backup. If changing from SpeedKit to CBT or Ordinary mode, the reserved VM snapshot will be cleared on the next run of the job.