Daily synthetic full backup instead of incremental

[richardb]

Hi,

At the moment, I have backup jobs that create synthetic full backups every Saturday and incremental backups on the other days.

The backup repository is a Linux host with XFS and fastclone enabled.

I was wondering if there are any disadvantages to changing the jobs to perform daily synthetic full backups.

One advantage I can think of is the shorter backup chains (one day), which would allow me to retain exactly the number of days configured in the retention policy.

Best regards
Richard

[david.domask]

Hi Richard,

Nothing too immediate comes to mind, but if you are doing tape out, keep in mind these requirements, as each full will be a "new" backup chain (VBK + VIBs) rather than all the fulls being considered part of the same chain.

One advantage I can think of is the shorter backup chains (one day), which would allow me to retain exactly the number of days configured in the retention policy.

Can you explain this one a bit more? Not quite following what you mean here, as typically the number of restore points will reflect the days of retention assuming the job runs once a day, but I suspect I'm misunderstanding something.

[RubinCompServ]

@David.Domask

I would suspect that he is doing Immutable Backups, which can keep up to 6 extra backups (assuming a weekly synthetic full). By doing a daily synthetic full, each backup is, essentially, a new chain so it would have to hold the past-retention Full waiting for the associated Incrementals to age out.

[richardb]

but if you are doing tape out

I am not using tape out.

Can you explain this one a bit more?

RubinCompServ is right For example: If I only have one full backup per week and have configured a retention policy of 7 days, I always have up to 14 restore points.

[david.domask]

Great, then I don't see any particular challenges with this if tape-out is not relevant for you. Idea makes sense in your case.