Incremental backup with stsadm sitecolleciton backup

Question

I was looking into doing backup with stsadm and I found that with catastrophic backup we can achieve differential and full backup but in catastrophic stsadm backup can we achive this at sitecollection level or webapplication level?

Basically i have a webapplication of which I want to do full and incremental backup any suggestoins ?

Answer 1

With the stsadm backup operation, you can do full or differential backups, not incremental. You select between full and differential using the -backupmethod parameter.

If you use the -url parameter to the backup operation, the backups are done at a site collection level. If you use the -item parameter, you can backup at the content database or web application level.

You'll probably need to do some playing around with the -showtree parameter to understand the syntax required for the -item parameter. -showtree will give you a tree of everything in your server farm, and mark what is going to be backed up if you were to remove the -showtree parameter.

See this TechNet article, especially the "Correction" community content by Mark Vogt at the bottom of the page for details about how to get this setup.