I think I figured this out but if someone can confirm, please respond.

The way I understood how the old Cloudberry backup worked the first backup you made had to be a full backup and then all future backups were incremental. With the old Cloudberry backup, if I recall correctly, I could log into cloud storage and if there was a file that was outdated and no longer on my local drive, I could remove it from cloud storage. Based on the information I found online today, the new MSP360 backup works totally different.

With MSP360 it considers whatever files are in a backup to be a backup set and you cannot delete an individual file because the backup set only contains the files that the were present at the time of the backup so an individual backup set will never contain an old, outdated file.

The next piece is that if your backup is setup to do an incremental backup every day then you cannot delete any old backup sets as the current backup set is based on prior incremental backup sets. To be able to delete old incremental backup sets you must have a newer full backup and MSP360 will purge off the old incremental backup sets as they age unless you enable GFS.

My problem was that my backup definition file was setup for incremental backups only so my consumption of storage space kept increasing as nothing was being removed. To solve my problem I had to remove everything, which was not an issue, change my backup definition to remove Sunday from the incremental schedule and then add Sunday as a full backup and enable GFS for 6 weeks, 3 months and 1 year. After doing so I reduced my storage by 2/3 and MSP360 did a full backup since all of my old backup sets were purged.

So, if I understood anything incorrectly as to how MSP360 works please let me know.

Alexander,
Thanks for the reply. My concern has to do with deletion of individual files. For example, lets say that in December of 2023 I created a file named Quicken_Bkup_20231221. Subsequent usage of Quicken and more current backups have rendered the December backup unnecessary so on my SSD the December backup file was deleted and no longer exists locally. In a situation like this was that December backup file removed from cloud storage when it was physically deleted from my SSD and no longer present when my next backup was performed? If it was not deleted from cloud storage how does one deleted it from Cloud storage? From what I see in the above example is that you can delete an actual backup set but not an individual file within the backup set. My concern is that there may be important files in a specific backup set that are important to keep. Am I missing something as I'm concerned that with my configuration set to incremental backups, individual files like the one in my example will never receive any further incremental versions and will just take up space in cloud storage increasing my cloud storage costs. I seem to remember that in the old Cloudberry backup before the latest backup model was created I could go out to BackBlaze and remove individual files but now the individual files are in a single, compressed files not individually stored in the cloud. That's why I'm confused..

Thanks for the feedback. I had a lot going on in my personal life when the new backup format became available and missed the details. I seldom went out to BackBlaze to look at the data there and even then it may have only been to manually remove a file that I felt might have been orphaned due to it being incorrectly backed up in the first place or that I determined that it no longer needed to be backed up. Actually, I only use MP360 to backup files that are critical that may change on a daily basis and everything else is backed up using Macrium Reflect to a local external drive.

Just a follow-up question for you.... My backup plan is doing what it's supposed to but let's say that I change the plan and decide that I no longer need to backup a file. I've always been a bit fuzzy on what happens to the existing file that's already backed up. Does MP360 know that since it's no longer tagged for backup that it should be removed from BackBlaze?

Ted,

Thanks for the feedback. It's always nice to hear that someone else found value in a solution you developed. I've not had any problems with backups not running since I added the script.

Bill

Matt,

Here's the script I wrote to make sure that the service is running. I saved the script below to a file called CBStart.vbs . I then opened the Task Scheduler on my Windows 10 PC and set up a task to run the .VBS file 15 minutes before my Cloudberry nightly backup is set to run. Note that on the task scheduler you have to check the checkbox on the General Tab so that the script will run with the highest privileges because with standard privileges command to start the service will not function. Note that when testing this script I rat it in a command prompt that I opened to run as an administrator. In regard to whether it's overkill or not depends on how important it is to run your nightly backup because as I mentioned previously if the service is not running, your backups are not taking place there's no warning to tell you that your backups are not taking place.



ServiceName = "Cloudberry Backup Service"
Set wmi = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/cimv2")
state = wmi.Get("Win32_Service.Name='" & ServiceName & "'").State
If State = "Stopped" then
Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colListOfServices = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Service Where Name ='" & ServiceName & "'")
For Each objService in colListOfServices
objService.StartService()
Next
shell.LogEvent 4, "CloudBerry Backup Service was restared"
End If

Mike,
I went thru the same process when I evaluated Cloudberry and I opted to use BackBlaze as my cloud storage provider. BackBlaze offers you 10GB of storage for free and they only charge you if you exceed that amount. If you do exceed the 10 GB the amount they charge is insanely low. In addition Cloudberry works really well with this storage provider as I get encryption and versioning of my backups.

Matt,
Thanks for the reply. This is exactly what I was seeing as I only had one copy of each file so since versioning is a big need Google Drive is out. After seeing this post and receiving your email I tried OneDrive since I also have space there but Cloudberry Backup cannot do encryption and compression with that repository either so today opened up an cloud storage account on Backblaze B2. The will provide 10 GB for free and 100 GB would only cost me $0.50 which is an insane price. I plan to do some additional testing but I'm assuming that this will be a better choice. I'll post an update when I'm finished testing. Thanks again.