Reverse incremental jobs to forward incremental jobs - synthetic full to tape

[martin_nz]

Hello

Earlier this year I converted a reverse incremental job to a forward incremental one and ran an active full. This image is then written to tape as a synthetic full

I have done the same for another job but it’s not writing to the tape as a synthetic full.

Have I missed a step?

[foggy]

Hi Martin, please make sure the job is running forever forward incremental, not just forward incremental - i.e. does not have periodic fulls scheduled.

[martin_nz]

Hi Foggy
All of my job settings are set to be forever full incremental.

Funny thing happened - on Friday night when my tape backup ran the backup file was ignored so wasn't written to tape but when I kicked off a test backup today the backup created a synthetic full for tape and wrote it to the tape as good as gold. Is this normal behaviour?

[foggy]

Hard to say, it's too little information to judge. If you feel it doesn't work as expected, feel free to open a case to review your setup closer.

[jasonede]

We've noticed this after upgrading to version 10 too... Our backups to tape are writing incrementals not full backups. All of our backup jobs are forever forward incremental.

[martin_nz]

I have logged a job - 04285741
It wrote one synthetic full and since then it hasn't done it

[martin_nz]

I haven’t had much success after logging my case. My files are not backing up to tape as I expect them to

[martin_nz]

We've noticed this after upgrading to version 10 too... Our backups to tape are writing incrementals not full backups. All of our backup jobs are forever forward incremental.

Hi Jason - have you managed to resolve this?

[jasonede]

We have a case open. In the process of resolving. Should know in a few weeks.

[rayc@567.net.au]

Am very interested in the solution to this.
We had to set up v9 as reverse incremental to get full backup to tape each night. No amount of testing with any form of forward incremental would work.
Business requirement was for fastest recovery mechanism.
Am upgrading to v10 with same business requirement, but quite different topology which would suit forever forward incremental much better.
Thanks.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

As some of the guys did not post case numbers as required by the forums rules, I cannot check what the problem was for them.

As you did not even upgrade yet, I would just guess, that you will have no issues. If you run into issues: please open a case and support will help to resolve the issue.

Best regards,
Hannes

[rayc@567.net.au]

Thanks Hannes
For background we are moving from having a VBR server in each site (8) to a centralised environment. The tape environment is also moving to a new central data centre. I will have little time or opportunity to test getting full backups to tape daily with forward incremental processing. Hence my interest in this topic.Love to hear anyone else's experiences as well. Cheers. Ray.

[jasonede]

Our case number is #04284308. It's taken a while to get this far due to the jobs only running monthly so needing to wait quite a while to verify each stage.
I've been told that full backups are only written when the job is run according to schedule, so if it fails for whatever reason and you run it manually there is no guarantee that a full backup will be written. This month 2 of our jobs ran and produced what looks like full backups but the third said that there were no new files to be backed up.
There does seem to have been a fundamental change in how the backup to tape operates in version 10 and it wasn't at all clear from the documentation that manually running a full backup does not guarantee a full backup to tape. As it operates now it seems like it's a bug and there is no way to override it to put a full backup to tape as the job settings seem to describe.