Yearly Forward Incremental

[nchand]

Any experience keeping 365 day forward incremental backups?

I would like to start an Active Full backup January 1, then do incremental daily for a year without losing anything to retention settings. One reason I have for this is to reduce the number of tapes for my tape backup. After every incremental, I have a backup-to-tape job to copy the online backup to offline. If I do active fulls every week/month, I have just exponentially added to the required # of tapes I need.

Also, on Dec 31, I can simply take all of the tapes and have a full daily archive of the entire year, losing nothing to retention synthetics. I would restart an Active Full on Jan 1 the following year with a new set of tapes.

Thoughts?

[Shestakov]

Although 365-point long chains work fine with Veeam, restore in the end of the year may be tricky.
You may try forever forward incremental + Virtual Full Backup to tape.
Is your goal to keep 365 restore points or you just don`t want to use too many tapes?

[nchand]

"Is your goal to keep 365 restore points or you just don`t want to use too many tapes?" - Both... I would like to store daily versions of any backup changes, but also keep my number of tapes to a minimum. Previously, on December 25 I would take an active yearly full-backup and save that to long-term-storage. But, by doing that, I lose all changes made throughout the 12 months of that previous year. I would like to keep all those changes, hence having 365 restore points. I would simply send all those year's tapes to long term storage, which would not be that many really, maybe 5-10 LTO-5 tapes.

If I synthesize full backups to tape monthly, I feel it will require vast amounts more of tape capacity.

[nchand]

Also, with forever forward incremental, a retention plan is still recommended right? Are people doing an active full, then forever incremental with an infinite retention period? The problem with retention periods (for me) is that you end up losing large time-frames of versioning.

[Shestakov]

Using forever forward incremental method you don`t need to perform periodic full backups if you perform recoverability tests(Surebackup).
In your case, I would make full backup to split the chain at least once a quarter.

[nchand]

OK, I will try out SureBackup, have not used that feature yet. Maybe quarterly fulls would be OK too, would still save me a bit on tapes.

Just to make sure, the only way to ensure a year of incrementals is to set my retention to > 365 right? (given that the job runs once per day).

[veremin]

Correct.