Synthetic full vs Forever forward

[bubbagump]

Many of our VMs we only keep 7 days of restore points. In digging into forever forward (FF) vs synthetic full, I am not seeing a major difference in how things will occur. It just seems like a directional minutiae difference. FF will merge blocks from VIBs back into an existing VBK. SF will create a new VBK and merge the old VBK and any new VIBs into that VBK. In either case it seems like you get the same result and the same I/O hit. The main advantage of SF is when you are keeping restore points for more than a week you end up with multiple VBKs for potentially faster restores and cleaner VIB management. Am I thinking about this correctly?

[Shestakov]

Hi,
Your general understanding is correct, I just have some comments.
In case of synthetic full the merge of 7 files occurs once a week, while forever forward merges 1 file during each run.

The main advantage of SF is when you are keeping restore points for more than a week you end up with multiple VBKs for potentially faster restores and cleaner VIB management.

I would not say that`s an advantage. With forever forward you always have only 1 full backup, so it requires less space.
Note that in forever forward incremental mode, during the backup process itself there is only 1 I/O to the repository, a single write, which means the VM backup will complete much faster, the other 2 I/Os are performed "post-process" during a merge at the end of the job.
Here is a good relative discussion.
Thanks!

[Vladimir_AUS]

You are not authorized to read this discussion. When I click on your link.

[Shestakov]

Hi Vladimir and welcome to the community!
I`ve fixed it, thanks!