V13 Reverse incremental - used for long term archive

[yizhar]

Hello

I am currently using reverse incremental feature combined with external disks for long term archive, as follows:

weekly backups with reverse incremental, kept for about 6 month chain, kept on local disk repository of backup server.
(in addition to different daily chain either forward or incremental, not releated to this topic).

every 6 month i copy the whole chain to external disk, and keep it.

this way i can restore data from older restore points, in 1 week granularity.
example - i can restore or browse data from a 2 years old archive, selecting the exact restore point with the data i need to restore or review.

i cant find a way to achive this with forward incrementals, because:
forward incremental with block clone and synthetic full - i cannot copy the whole chain to external disk because multiple VBK will take too much space.
forever incremenal for long term (6 month) without any newer full - doesn't seem reasonable to me.

i would also ask you to reconsider and reimplement the option for reverse incremental, and let us the customers decide what best suites our needs.

Yizhar

[WoenK]

If you do forever forward incrementals it will be the same....even if it does not sound reasonable to you, I have been doing it for years and I really like the less IOs.
Reverse incrementals lost their benefits around V9...if you have not thought about optimizing your backup strategy since then, you reallly should. Things have changed in the past 8 years and external disks have never been a reliable backup solution, especially when using ReFS on them.