Are there expected integrity problems with incremental backups for clients without ECC-RAM?

[Nyctophilia]

Hi there,

see title. For example you have a baremetal Debian client and you secure it with the Proxmox Backup Server: Could a client destroy a whole backup-chain which has been going on for a few months/years because some backup contains corrupted data though bit-flips in RAM?

Thanks in advance!

 

[H4R0]

If you run incremental backups for years theres something wrong with your backup strategie. Keep it as short as possible for incremental chains, otherwise use differential backups.

And for bit flips it doesnt matter if it's a full backup, incremental or differential, it will corrupt your backups and you would not notice. Restore will work anyway but some bits will be off. It can happen all the time and there is nothing you can do against except running ecc ram.

Bit flips would most likely already corrupt the data before it is even backed up, so i dont really get your question. It has nothing todo with incremental backups.

 

[fabian]

backups only ever add new chunks, pruning logically removes them, garbage collection then removes all those now unreferenced chunks.

if the data on disk on the source side is good, a bit flip might upload one (or more, if it affects the page cache) corrupt backups, but once the data is re-read from disk it will be backed up correctly again since the chunk has changed according to the clients point of view.