Local reverse incremental backup copy to datacenter

[JSwitlinski]

Hi everyone,

we've got a branch office, which backups their data locally. We backuped them in incremental mode and copied them to our data center over night.
Since the data becomes very large and we are not allowed to upgrade the local storage, we considered to save storage and use reverse incremental backups.

The current configuration is incremental backups with monthly full backups and a copy job to put them backups into our data center. The local retention time should be one month.
I'm thinking about changing the local backup to reverse incremental to keep 1 full backup and 6 incremental backups locally, because there would be barely enough storage for.
But how are they copied into the data center, like the source backup? It would be necessary to create 1 full backup plus several incrementals. After one month a new chain should be created and the old data should be deleted.

Jonathan

[Shestakov]

Hi Jonathan,
Have you considered forever forward incremental method?
It will also require only one full backup but works faster then reverse incremental method.
Thanks

[PetrM]

Hello,

But how are they copied into the data center, like the source backup? It would be necessary to create 1 full backup plus several incrementals. After one month a new chain should be created and the old data should be deleted.

By default, backup copy job uses forever incremental mode. I'm wondering why would you like to recreate the chain every month instead of having 30 restore points permanently?
The default method allows you to follow 3-2-1 rule and to comply with your 30 days RPO requirement.

It's definitely good idea to consider forever incremental mode for local backup as well but it will be faster than reversed only if the repository becomes a "bottleneck" due to heavy I/O load.
There is a good overview for I/O impact of the different backup modes.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Consider also enabling GFS retention on the backup copy job for archival purposes. Will allow leaving, for ex., monthly backups, while removing everything in between.