Full and Incremental backup

[Mehrdad2525]

I am new to Veeam and have a little difficulty in understanding how veeam handles full and incremental backup
According to what i have read veeam does one full backup in the beginning when a backup is set up and te it is "forever"incremental", I am assuming that this full backup and the subsequent incremental backups are all inside a compressed and probably encrypted container file. How secure is this file against corruption and what happens if this file does get corrupted?? also what to do when this file grows larger and larger with all incremental backups overtime??
Another Q is, according to how i understand this, since veeam uses this "forever incremental" backup scheme, the only other way to get regular full backups is to do this manually, is there any way to automatize this?? either through Veeam itself or some veeam powershell cmdlet??

Regards /Mehrdad

[david.domask]

Hi Mehrdad2525,

Some corrections to your understanding:

1. Forever Forward Incremental: First, please check our KB article here, it has explanations and animations demonstrating how the different retention modes work. The full and incremental backup files are separate files on the system, and increments depend on the previous increments all the way back to the Full backup. With Forever Forward Incremental, old incremental restore points are merged into the VBK when they reach the retention time, and old data in the VBK file is marked as overwritable. The VBK growth should not be significant with this, but with Compacting the Full backup, a new Full backup will be rebuild without the excess unnecessary data.

2. You can configure the job to run periodic Active or Synthetic Fulls if desired, no need for scripting unless you prefer it. By enabling periodic fulls, the backup retention mode is Forward Incremental, which is also explained in the same KB above.

[Mehrdad2525]

Hi David
Appreciate the answer and the links, i will go through them, but one Q pops up, consider a scenario that we do a full back up and then incrementals, assume that some files are tampered with at some point in time maliciously, these will be in the incrementals (since they are changed) and if the tampering not discovered in time, will be incorporated in the full back when retention time for them expires, right??
thus making the backup unusable, this can not be correct so what am I missing here in the mechanism??

Regards /Mehrdad