Backup to repository and tape...and synthetic full and active full

[ajped]

Hello everyone,
so far in my backup jobs of the virtual machines I had configured a synthetic full backup once a week. Now in addition to the backups to the repository in disk I have started to store these backups on tapes for archival purposes and to comply with the 3-2-1 rule. To avoid wasting tape space, I'd wish I didn't have to store a full copy on tape every week. The only alternative I see is to disable synthetic full copies and enable only active copies so I can do full backups less frequently (for example, once a month). By doing this I see that I am sacrificing being able to have full copies each week in my repository on disk (in addition to having to increase the number of restore points) in exchange for being able to save space on tape. I do not understand why you can not configure synthetic full backups every 2, 3 or 4 weeks and however you can set active copies with margins of more longer than a month. Can you suggest me a best way to do that?.

Thank you very much.

[HannesK]

Hello,

I do not understand why you can not configure synthetic full backups every 2, 3 or 4 weeks

because it would be too slow on storage systems that do not have REFS / XFS block cloning. It would simply never finish and customers would open tons of support cases...

however you can set active copies with margins of more longer than a month

For active full backup, there are no merges. So the performance of the backup storage is no problem.

Does that answer your question?

Best regards,
Hannes

[ajped]

Hi Hannes,
What about customers who have REFS?. It would be an improvement if the configuration of synthetic full backups were more flexible for repositories with REFS.
Thank you for your help.

[HannesK]

Hello,
I'm not sure whether it would really be an improvement. I mean if you ever need to restore from tape and you have to read up to 30 increments... well, that will take a long time.

Currently my opinion is, that it is better to "protect" our customers from such setups. Tape is a pretty cheap media, so I would say it's better to keep it as it is.

Best regards,
Hannes