Avoid merging oldest incremental into full

[Guido]

Hi,
We are going to migrate our vmware environment to a complete new location. We are using Veeam to get the data moved.
The final incremental backup should be as fast as possible to reduce the downtime. Of course we a trying to reduce the amount of changed data in our environment to achieve a faster final incremental backup.

I see that the backup job is taking a long time for the "Merging oldest incremental backup into full backup file" now. That brought me to a idea to increase the retention of the backup job the day before this critical final backup. Will this result into a backup job without this merging step?

Kind regards

[veremin]

This will allow you to avoid the merge process until new extended retention is reached and the oldest increment is merged into the full base backup - this is how the forever forward incremental backup method works.

[vmtech123]

Is forever forward the default these days? I've been using them for years but I recall something about that being recommended by Veeam now.

[barlid]

Hi guido,

This condition

"Merging oldest incremental backup into full backup file"

happened because your backup method using Forever Forward Incremental, It will inject incremental file to old VBK to produce new VBK.

Like Veremin suggestion, to avoid this, you need change your backup job to Forward Incremental by enabling full backup either Synthetic / active full backup.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Thanks,

[foggy]

Is forever forward the default these days? I've been using them for years but I recall something about that being recommended by Veeam now.

It is not the default but can be recommended in many cases (keeping in mind the repository type - you have to enable periodic fulls for dedupe storage, for example).