Incremental Backup
An incremental backup stores only the data that has changed since the previous full or incremental backup. Typically a series of incremental backups are done between full backups. Incremental backups are more compact than archived journals and are faster to restore. It is possible to schedule frequent incremental backups (for example, by ranges of hours) because an incremental backup generally takes less time to complete than a full backup. In normal conditions, it is recommended an incremental backup not be configured for a frequency less than every four hours.
To enable an incremental backup, set Incremental backup to true while initiating or scheduling a backup. See Backing Up a Database for details. Full and incremental backups need to be scheduled separately. An example configuration might be:
Full backups scheduled monthly
Incremental backups scheduled daily
A full backup and a series of incremental backups can allow you to recover from a situation where a database has been lost. Incremental backup can be used with or without journal archiving. If you enable both incremental backup and journal archiving, you can replay the journal starting from the last incremental backup timestamp. See Backing Up Databases with Journal Archiving for more about journal archiving.
Note
When you restore from an incremental backup, you need to do a full backup before you can continue with incremental backups.
Incremental backup and journal archiving both provide disaster recovery. Incremental backup uses less disk space than journal archiving, and incremental backup is faster than using journal archiving.
Note
If MarkLogic Server cannot memory-map files from the backup in the underlying file system, it cannot create an incremental backup. So MarkLogic incremental backups require that the backup file system support memory-mapping operations (mmap).
For recovery you only need to specify the timestamp for the recovery to start and the server will figure out which full backup and which incremental backup(s) to use. You only need to schedule the incremental backup; the server will link together (or chain) the sequence the incremental backups automatically. See Restoring from an Incremental Backup with Journal Archiving for details.