I'm sure this has been answered before, but wanted to ask anyway.
I use Symantec Backup Exec regularly to external USB hard drives. As a secondary/safety I will also use the internal 2008 Server Backup program. With Symantec I do a full system backup on Friday nights and incremental backups Monday - Thursday. The incremental usually only takes 15-30 minutes. When that job finishes I will log into the server and start the built in Windows Server backup. I usually do a full server backup which then creates the "WindowsImageBackup" folder on my external hard drive. What I've normally been doing is deleting that folder each night on that particular night's USB drive and re-run a full server backup, roughly (600+ GB), which runs overnight.
Now if I don't delete that folder and run the backup I'm assuming this is an incremental backup and generally I see about 60+ GB being backed up. Is this 60GB worth of data that has changed since the last full backup? I guess my question here is that backup from the original full backup and the changes made from the week following is still a full backup as of that evening? Or am I only able to restore just the changes from the previous week?
Maybe I'm doing overkill here, but if I run a full system backup using the Windows Server backup I feel safer that I have a full backup from every evening. Over the weekend if I have time I have a dedicated USB drive that contains a full Windows Server Backup, while my other drives share the Symatec Backup Exec incremental saves and my Windows Server Backup.