[V13] Deprecated and Discontinued features - Reverse Incremental

[roland]

Hi guys

In V13 Reverse incremental will be deprecated but there are a lot of people who use it. I'm one of them, so i need to know and understand how to migrate my jobs to increment mechanism.

I understand that veeam need to simplify its dev and want to promote forever incremental/incremental because of immutability on object storage.
But everyone is not using S3 and immutability and the traditional way to obtain an offline copy by using tapes is used by many peoples in the world, not few.
I'll do a fast comparison between the two methods:
-In order to obtain this tape externalization, we need to put full backup on as few tapes as possible in safe place.
To achieve this you just have to put the last vbk on tape with a file to tape job. No need to use backup to tape job. (available in standard version license)

-If you use incremental backup you need to consolidate the last full backup and every increment on the tape using backup to tape job by activating virtual full backup option. (need additional license probably)
This is achieve by using a tape job which build a complete synthetic full backup from the last good full backup and all it's increments, very time consuming and less robust regarding block corruption i guess.
This is only working in V12 if your backups jobs to disks don't use synthetic full backup or active full backup.
In this case it's seems that backup to disk have only one first vbk and many increments. And the vbk is injecting the oldest increment, keeping increments according to the retention policy.
The backup to disk is never rebuild from original datas, always build from old blocks and new modified blocks.

So it's difficult to build a complete strategy, how to have incremental backup on disks during weekdays for example and periodically rebuild of full backups on disk on week ends (active full) and a tape job with full backup using as few tape as possible ?

Someone suggest in different post to use GFS Media pool, but it needs entreprise license too.
My opinion about GFS media pool
-it's very difficult to know which tape is use and when, so difficult to export all tapes from the library to have a complete externalize full backup with all tapes in a safe place.
-license needed
-probably need a robotic library to manage multiple media (daily, weekly, monthly, ...)

So for the moment i didn'nt find confortable way to migrate to incremental backup.
Any help or constructive answer is welcome.
Thanks

[david.domask]

Hi roland,

Your use case for Reverse Incremental is understood, and the recommendation is to use Forever Forward Incremental (FFI) backups targeting a Fast-clone capable repository. Our Forums FAQ on Tape covers this question with links to the relevant User Guide pages. (search "Q: How can I have a Full Backup written to tape each day?")

This will work with either Backup to Tape or File to Tape, though Backup to Tape will provide easier management of the backups and more functionality for restores.

Alternatively, you can also use VeeamZIP/Export Backup as described in this thread, and simply have a scheduled script start the VeeamZIP/Export backup on desired days, and have the File to Tape job back up these backups. This unfortunately requires additional disk space, though with Fast Clone capable repositories, Export Backup will produce space-less full backups as well which can be copied to tape.

So I understand the challenge you're trying to overcome, and I think we have a few options where at least one should be a good replacement for this side-benefit of Reverse Incremental.

[roland]

Hi David, thank you for your answer.
I already read and work with this Q&A, howewer synthetic full backup are not active full backup and doesn't address corrupted blocks problematic.
About space requirement Fast clone repository is theorically a good solution but you rely then on an external technology (like ReFs) that you don't manage and you are not in control.
I fear if the Refs is corrupted you can't know it and all your backup chain is then lost.
About Veeam licensing if your are in CPU mode and not in VUL with a standard version, backup job to tape are not available, so no virtual full tape !
This is why i prefer Active full backup and Reverse incremental. (Rip).

In order to progress on this problematic and keep the same level of protection in V13 as we have in V12 would it possible to build virtual full to tape even if:
- we have sythetic full or active full on disk ? I don't know why it's not possible today in V12.
- we have standard license

Thanks

[roland]

Would it be possible to build virtual full to tape in V13/V14 in backup to tape job even if we have synthetic or active full periodically on backup to disk ?

[david.domask]

Hi roland,

The idea can be considered, sure, and with removal of Reverse Incremental there is probably some logic to this. Will be discussed.

As for the problematic block problem, this will be an issue regardless of the file system in use. ReFS does do periodic scans and will remove files with bad blocks from the ReFS namespace (make them inaccessible) if it's the case, and this is logged in the Windows Event Log. XFS has similar handling and will report bad blocks, and depending on your configuration for the ReFS/XFS, there are some chances to repair. Combined with regular Health Checks and SureBackup jobs with content verification scans, I think you will be fairly well covered when it comes to the risk of bad blocks.

However, I think the standard license is going to be the main issue here, as that is indeed quite limited on functionality, and given the changes with Reverse Incremental, I would still focus on changing the source backup to Forward Incremental targeting a fast clone capable repository, then using a File to Tape job to backup the most recent VBK. With the above checks to monitor for bitrot, it should be the best option with standard license.

[roland]

The FAQ says 'Jobs targeting a Fast Clone capable repository can be configured to create a Synthetic Full every day; with Fast Clone, the Synthetic Full backups are “spaceless”'
Is that true when using active full every days ?

[david.domask]

Hi roland,

Fast clone is not engaged with Active Fulls, so just switching to Synthetics or a combination of periodic Active fulls and Synthetics (which is allowed) can also be used, as I know you have concerns about Synthetic Fulls. I would still advise Health Checks and the SureBackup Verification Scan to further assuage concerns on bitrot, but a combination of Active Fulls + Synthetics is allowed.

[roland]

Thanks David