About incremental backup
NetBackup supports incremental backups for Cloud object store workloads. You can use incremental backup without enabling accelerator.
For Cloud object store workload, some metadata properties do not alter the modification time for an object or blob. For example, the Tags in Azure blobs. Even if you change these metadata properties, the corresponding objects are not considered for the next incremental backup. This may appear as a loss of data during an incremental backup.
For Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Lake Government providers, when you update the ACLs of files or directories, the last modified time of the file or directory doesn't change. So, only by changing the ACLs, the files and directories do not qualify as incremental backups.
For a detailed list of metadata properties that do not alter modification time for an object or blob, refer to the respective cloud provider's documentation.
For incremental backups, if an object name has a path-style naming scheme, then for each path, an entry is added in NetBackup. If the object, which is represented by the end node of this path style naming, has not changed since the last backup (either full or last incremental, based on the incremental schedule used), then that object is not included in the next incremental backup. Because of this behavior, empty paths show up in the catalog and are rendered in the browse view of restore.