9.5 U2 need for active fulls?

[rntguy]

Hi,

Does anyone know what the guidance is on running new active fulls on 9.5 after installing U2? It can't hurt I know but is there a real need to? It would require all our customers reseeding over the wire which takes a while.

Thanks

[Gostev]

No changes in guidance after installing U2. In fact, there has not been any changes a few years now, and I don't expect any changes in the foreseeable future.

As the reminder, in early B&R versions, technical reasons for running active full where:

1. To defragment and clean up full backup file from stale data. This need has been addressed by the addition of Compact functionality, just make sure you have it scheduled to run periodically in the advanced job settings.

2. To "break" incremental backup chain periodically for perceived added reliability. This need has been addressed by the addition of Health Check functionality. Again, just make sure you have it scheduled.

So, there are no reasons except peace of mind. Most importantly, just remember to test your customer's backups (whether or not you end up using active full).

Thanks!

[rntguy]

Thank you. I'll to read up on the compact functionality again, been a while. Must be some of our jobs are missing that as I know support has told us we should run active fulls in the past year. We started at 9.0.

[rntguy]

One question I had is about a particular VM. Unfortunately every night brand new 800 GB image files are generated on here. The customer cannot afford to keep more than one backup of it on site and then we run a copy job to the cloud for longer retention. Veeam sees 100% of the data as brand new.

Essentially it's just like a FULL every night. What is the fastest way to back this up where aside from the OS changes (couple gb at most) it's a full backup. We only want to see the vbm and vbk file afterward each day, no vib or vrb file which can take up almost as much space. Set restore points to 1, use incremental and set 'active full's to occur daily? Do I then need to use health checks and defragmentation? Or should I do incrementals with synthetic fulls and perform those every day instead of once a week? but then I'd need to also schedule a health check once a week as well as a defrag, right, to be safe?

[Gostev]

With this amount of changes, active full every day will normally be the fastest. And if you enable one, you will see that you won't be able to turn on compact, since it is no longer necessary.