Some Questions About Best Practice

[tomnewman]

I've been looking at moving away from Full Periodic backups and been looking at options for verifying backups.

Although not related to best practice, my first question is about defragmenting. My understanding is that reverse incremental will benefit from periodic defragmentation because of the way the full backup is built. Is this correct? Do incremental backups with synthetic full benefit from defragmentation or is the synthetic full backup 'built from scratch' so does not need defragmenting?

There seem to be two similar maintenance tasks, Storage-level Corruption Guard in the Backup options and Backup File Integrity Scan in Surebackup. Is there any point in running both? Do each give some benefit that the other doesn't? If not, why have the two options? From what I have read about how they work, Backup File Integrity Scan seems to be the more thorough option (but takes longer), so is that the 'better' option and if I use it is there any point in doing Storage-level Corruption Guard?

[PTide]

Hi,

My understanding is that reverse incremental will benefit from periodic defragmentation because of the way the full backup is built. Is this correct? Do incremental backups with synthetic full benefit from defragmentation or is the synthetic full backup 'built from scratch' so does not need defragmenting?

Yes, it is beneficial for reverse incremental mode. Regarding synthetic fulls - you cannot enable compact and defragmentation if you have periodic fulls configured in your job.

Storage-level Corruption Guard in the Backup options and Backup File Integrity Scan in Surebackup.

Right, they work pretty much the same way underneath, however, as described on this page:

If during the health check Veeam Backup & Replication detects corrupted data blocks in the latest restore point in the backup chain (or, in case of forever forward incremental and forward incremental chains, the restore point before the latest one if the latest restore point is incomplete), it will start the health check retry and transport valid data blocks from the source volume to the backup repository.

That is, corruption guard will attempt to fix things, while Surebackup won't.

Thanks!

[tomnewman]

Thanks for the reply P.Tide

Regarding synthetic fulls - you cannot enable compact and defragmentation if you have periodic fulls configured in your job.

The user interface allows me to schedule defrag on a synthetic full backup. Do you mean it can't do it on the same run as creating the file? But I could schedule it another day (we create synthetic fulls once a week)? Do synthetic fulls need defrag - are they created the same way as reverse incrementals by block injection or do they copy all the data to a new file?

That is, corruption guard will attempt to fix things, while Surebackup won't

So why do Backup File Integrity Scan in Surebackup? If it does a lesser job (not attempting to fix)? It also takes twice as long as Storage-level Corruption Guard. I feel I must be missing something!

[tomnewman]

Any further clarification from anybody on my two questions in the previous post?

[foggy]

With synthetic fulls defragmentation is not required, since they are created from scratch. As for your second question, then SureBackup performs integrity check for the restore point it verifies, while health check does that for the latest restore point, so use cases are a bit different.

[tomnewman]

Thank foggy. I was initially doing weekly integrity checks and health checks on the same backups which is clearly a waste of time. It's also worth knowing there is no benefit to defragging synthetic fulls.

I do read the documentation and search online before I ask questions but I couldn't find the answer anywhere.

[BrentBPPI]

Is there a difference between Storage-level Corruption guard and in SureBackup Backup file integrity check?

I am trying to decide if it's worth spinning up all VM's just to run the backup file integrity check.

[PTide]

Hi,

Please see foggy's answer above,

Thanks!