Do I need to retake full backup regularly?

General
1

Generally in backup strategy it’s recommended to take full backup once a week for enterprise and once a month for personal

how does that apply to Kopia’s snapshot method, how to take full backup in kopia ?

2

There is no such thing as a “full backup” in Kopia - or better, every snapshot is a “full backup”, since you can restore the entire state of the source for every snapshot Kopia did. Full- and incremental backups are just old concepts from the time, when deduplication wasn’t widely available or even invented.

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3

What you have to do instead is to fully verify your backups (see `kopia snapshot verify`)

4

This is a rather misleading comment… I never had any issues with my Kopia repos integrity-wise and the question was not how to verify a snapshot…

5

Given how kopia works it is not needed and not even possible. Kopia always relies on already stored data.

However to make sure that nothing is missed and nothing is corrupted (which is the purpose of running full backup in other backup solutions) I would suggest the following:

  1. from time to time create snapshot with --force-hash 100 flag. Normally kopia detects subsequent files changes only based on files attributes. It can be not 100% reliable. This flag forces kopia to check everything bit by bit.
    Very rare but possible that some programs modify something and try to “hide” it. Example in my system is veracrypt. I run full data hashing once every 10 days.

  2. As already mentioned make sure that you run snapshot verify to ensure that already stored data is not corrupted. Check docs for details. You can check all repo in one go or stagger it over time. I verify all repo in chunks to make sure that all is checked over a month time period.

Doing both will give your data and backup long and happy life:)

6

What does kopia maintenance run --full do

7

you posted link yourself which if you bother to read should clarify everything

8

I don’t understand "Full Maintenance Tasks are responsible for keeping the repository compact and eliminate deleted files that the user no longer wishes to store.

The most important task is Snapshot GC, which marks for deletion all contents that are no longer reachable from any of the active snapshots. Full Maintenance is also responsible for compaction of data pack blobs (p) after contents stored in them have been deleted. Full Maintenance Tasks are enabled by default and will execute every 24 hours"

9

Open google.com (or similar) and ask for “how does kopia full maintenance work in layman terms”

Google AI Overview is real accurate.

1 Like
10

What even is your question?