Incremental with daily synth. full or Reversed incremental

[smartsys]

I have a question, but I can't find the answer in all the posts regarding this subject.

Required:
A daily full backup to tape and minimal time to restore the complete enviroment if disaster strikes.

Options:
A. Use reversed incremental and take the loss of diskspace when VM's are removed or shrunken for granted. Copy the *.vbk files to tape as soon as veeam is finished.
B. Use incremental backup with synthetic full backup configured to run daily and enable the convert to rollback points option. Copy the *.vbk files to tape as soon as veeam is finished.

Question:
Will option B provide me with the same results as option A, but with the advantage of reduced file sizes if VM's are deleted or shrunken in disksize?

For as far as I know with option B. the first backup will be a full. The next will be an incremental, but a new synthetic full is created and a vrb is created. This continues on and on so only one vbk file will exist and this contains the same information as the vbk used when using the reversed incremental. The advantage is, that in this case the full backup is being recreated each time so if a VM is deleted or is reduced in disksize the new full backup will also be reduced in disksize. Is this correct?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Jeroen,

How frequent do you delete protected VMs from inventory? I assume not very often, so I would recommend choosing a combination of reversed incremental backup + weekly full to reduce the VBK file size if you happen to have deleted VMs.

On the other hand, if backup storage free space is not an issue, you can select to run active full backup weekly and tick all days on the schedule, this would allow you to have active fulls everyday, assuming that you've scheduled your backup jobs to run once a day.

Thank you.

[smartsys]

Hello Vitaliy,

It's not very often that VM's are deleted, but they are moved accross datastores and this also causes extra diskspace that isn't automatically returned to the filesystem.
The problem is diskspace. There is no unlimited amount of diskspace and we only want one full backup per job on disk. We also want this to include the most recent data. If possible we want it to be as small as possible to limit the amount of tapes and the time it takes to put it to tape.
We use the surebackup function to regulary check the backup for "restorability".

Is the Incremental option with a daily triggers synthetic full and the convert previous full backup chains to rollback points an option?

[Gostev]

Answering the 1st post,

Resulting VBKs will be absolutely the same with both options. If you enable transform, you have a single VBK that is not re-created each day, but rather in-place updated. So, VBK will be identical to one from option A, with the only benefit being shorter time that VM runs off snapshot (as transform happens after VIB was collected, and not on-the-fly like in option A).