Patent ID: 7165154

Claim:
A method of data backup of data stored in a first storage device coupled to a computer system, the method comprising steps of: using at least two backup storage media in a rotational manner to: store at least one full backup, each full backup comprising a copy of said data selected from the first storage device in accordance with a first criteria and attribute data representative of attributes of the selected data; store one or more incremental backups, each incremental backup comprising a copy of said data selected from the first storage device in accordance with the first criteria and a second criteria and attribute data representative of attributes of the selected data, said second criteria being automatically determined in relation to a parent backup comprising one of a selected full backup and a previously stored incremental backup; and store parent data representative of the relationship of each incremental backup to its respective parent backup in a dependency data structure on at least one of the at least two backup storage media; wherein the steps of storing the full and incremental backups and storing the parent data in the dependency data structure are performed automatically in accordance with preconfigured settings comprising at least two different time periods so as to store different incremental backup types having respective different data granularity.