Dump Levels for Daily, Cumulative Backups

Doing daily, cumulative incremental backups is the most commonly used backup scheme and is recommended for most situations. The following example shows a schedule using a level 9 dump each day, and a level 5 dump on Friday to restart the process.

In the following example, you could have used other numbers in the 1-9 range to produce the same results. The key is having the same number each day, with any lower number on Friday. For example, you could have specified levels 4, 4, 4, 4, 2 or 7, 7, 7, 7, 5.

Figure 42-1 Incremental Backup: Daily Cumulative