MySQL Backup Strategy
2 TB sounds too much for mysqldump. Did you try to restore a database from the dump? How much time does it take?

For large databases I would suggest XtraBackup. Not only it's faster, especially when it comes to restoring but it also supports incremental backups.

Weekly full copies sounds reasonable. For daily backups you have two options:


Incremental copy containing changes since last day.
Incremental copy containing changes since last full copy (sometimes this type is called differential backups). I prefer this one because of smaller restore time and higher chance to successfully restore the database.


If you need to store 13 month of data then you'd probably need to store 13 full copies. In that case storage requirements would be similar.

What you can do is to take full copy at month zero and then take a differential copy every moth. Then assuming 2TB initial size and 6% monthly growth the total storage size would be ~4TB.

Month   Database size, TB   Delta, TB
1   1.00    0.00
2   1.06    0.06
3   1.12    0.06
4   1.19    0.07
5   1.26    0.07
6   1.34    0.08
7   1.42    0.08
8   1.50    0.09
9   1.59    0.09
10  1.69    0.10
11  1.79    0.10
12  1.90    0.11
13  2.01    0.11
    Total delta, TB 1.01