NovaBACKUP Incremental Forever Backup with Rotational Media

NovaBACKUP’s Incremental Forever Backup strategy, especially when used with rotational media like USB drives or RDX cartridges, is designed to simplify backup management while ensuring data integrity and efficient storage use.

🔁 Incremental Forever Backup: Core Concept

NovaBACKUP begins with a single full backup—this is your baseline. Every subsequent backup only captures the changes made since the last backup, not since the last full backup. This differs from traditional backup schemes that require periodic full or differential backups.

Key benefits:
Faster backup times after the initial full backup.
Reduced storage usage since only deltas are stored.
No need to schedule multiple backup types—everything is handled in one job.

💾 How It Works with Rotational Media

When using rotational media (e.g., multiple USB drives swapped daily or weekly), NovaBACKUP ensures that each device can independently restore a full backup set:

First use of a new device: A full backup is written to that device.
Subsequent uses: Only changes since the last backup on that specific device are written.

This ensures that each device contains a complete and restorable backup chain, even if they are rotated out for days at a time. This approach is particularly useful for disaster recovery scenarios where only one device may be available.

🗂️ Retention and Pruning

Retention is managed at the backup job level:

Default retention is 30 days, but this can be customized.
The system prunes old data based on the “Maximum Backup Age” setting.
Retention does not simply delete a number of backups—it intelligently removes data outside the retention window while preserving the integrity of the backup chain.

🧠 Technical Enhancements

NovaBACKUP includes several technical improvements:

No longer relies on the archive bit to detect changes. Instead, it uses file attributes like last modified date and file size.
The backup engine is optimized for streaming and compression, improving performance for both local and cloud backups.