About scheduling synthetic and active full

[mtav]

Hello,

we are about to define new schedules for our backup and i wanted to ask if i'm missing anything:

We would like to have synthetic full once per week.

As we have quite a lot of jobs we would always take 5 - 6 Jobs and define the synthetic full for a specific weekday, lets say its Monday for the first 5 jobs. We also would like to do monthly active fulls, and so far i was planning to do them on the same weekday as the synthetic full was planned, so for the first 5 jobs (that have the synthetic full planned on Monday), i would schedule the monthly active full for lets say the first monday of the month. From my understanding if both a synthentic and active full are planned on the same day, the synthetic will be skipped and only the active full will be done.

Do you think this is ok or should we better schedule the monthly active full on some other weekday?

[Mildur]

Hello mtav

From my understanding if both a synthentic and active full are planned on the same day, the synthetic will be skipped and only the active full will be done.

Correct.

May I ask what sort of backup storage you use?
- NAS with SMB
- NAS with iSCSI and reFS
- physical windows server with reFS
- hardened repository with xfs
- .....

Best,
Fabian

[mtav]

Hello Fabian,

we use a physical HPE Server with internal Raid 6 and NTFS as Filesystem.

Kind regards

[Mildur]

Hi mtav

Thank you.
Any reason why you didn't use reFS (windows server 2016 and higher)?
With reFS, I would have recommended to run just synthetic fulls. Which would give you fast and spaceless full backups (FastClone. Because with NTFS, there is no space optimizations compared between active and synthetic full backups.

To answer your question, I would schedule your monthly active full on the same day as the synthetic full backup. Using a different day would lead to an additional full backup file for every job.

Best,
Fabian

[mtav]

Hello,

thank you. We still use NTFS instead of ReFS because we were suggested to do so by our local service provider, saying that ReFS is not yet as stable as it should be.

Kind regards