Restoring files from incremental backup (synthetic full)

[Iannone]

Hello everyone,
My current backup strategy is to do an incremental backup Sunday to Friday, then a synthetic full on Saturday. The full backup is written to tape. My question is, can I restore a file which existed on Sunday to Friday but did not exist on the Saturday when the "full" backup occurred. eg. a file is created on Wednesday, deleted on Friday, synthetic full backup happens on Saturday. Months down the track, can I get to the deleted file?

Hope it makes sense.

[david.domask]

Hi Jess,

Makes sense, and you'd need to recover the incremental point that held the file to repository first, then you can perform a File Level Recovery from that point.

Direct File Level Restore from backups stored on tape is not possible at the moment, so staging to repository first is required.

If this is data that needs to be stored on tape but may need to be recovered directly, consider a File Backup to Tape. Do note there are licensing requirements for workloads, but if the data amount is < 500 GiB, it is free (as in beer).

[Iannone]

The tape only contains the .vbk so I assume the incremental backups are not available.

[david.domask]

Ah, okay understood, I was under the impression you were backing up the incrementals as well. In that case, the VBK will represent the state of the workload on Saturday when the Synthetic full was made. Synthentic fulls are a standalone full backup made from a current incremental point and data from the previous points required to make a full backup. So that VBK will represent the state of the machine on Saturday.

I would advise consider including the incremental (VIB) backups if you would want to be able to recover from the incremental points.

[Iannone]

Thanks, I do backup the incremental to tape but I can't keep appending the incrementals to the same tape unless I expire the tapes. It seems silly to use a 30TB tape for 1 incremental backup which might only be 200GB. The idea is to backup the incremental files to tape and remove them from the library until the following week.

[david.domask]

You're very welcome for the information.

Veeam allows for separate media pools for full and incremental backups; would it help to have one tape hosting the incremental backups that can be marked as free periodically to allow the backups to continue? Basically, just keeping the incrementals available until the tape fills, mark the tape as free at the start of each week, and continue like that.

[Iannone]

The problem is that what I would like is to remove the tape from the library so I have a full backup on one tape and 5 incrementals on 5 different tapes with the ability of removing the tapes from the library until the following week but Veeam seems to refuse to write to the tape after its returned to the library until it expires...