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dgurrol
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Are There any Merge Process Details

Post by dgurrol »

I ran into an interesting issue that led me down a rabbit hole today...hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

I am trying to understand the Merge process and not because of performance issues or hangs or errors or whatever else I have been reading about all day today so far!

What I am trying to figure out is what exactly is the merge process doing in terms that can be described to extremely not technical people :D

If I am using a retention policy that retains the last 7 restore points (I think that needs to change to days - need to check if there are any drawbacks to that first)...with GFS is configured to:
  Keep weekly full backups for 4 weeks
     If multiple backups exist, use the one from: Friday

  Keep Monthly backups for: 12 months
     Use weekly backup from the following week of a month: Last

  Keep yearly full backups for: 7 years
     Use monthly full backup from the following month: January

My understanding here is that the oldest "incremental" last 7 restore points is merged into the weekly. I cannot see the specific admin settings - our hosted service's team manages that side of it, I can only see the self service portal.

I am trying to figure out how that merge process is working out what is actually merged - for example, if I have files in my oldest incremental but not in my weekly full, at time of merge what do I end up with.

I am hoping there is a way to end up with either:
1) a backup that has the files that existed at the time of the incremental but not at the time the weekly full occurred
or
2) a backup that has just the files that existed at the time of the full

What setting choices would be used to end up with either of these results? If both of these results are possible of course.
Mildur
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Full Name: Fabian K.
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Re: Are There any Merge Process Details

Post by Mildur »

Hello Daniel

When you enable weekly full backups, you will have a "Forward Incremental Backup Chain". There is no "merge process" with "Forward Incremental Backup Chains". On the day of the weekly full backup, we just create a new full backup.

We have an animation for "Forward Incremental Backup Chain" method/retention in our knowledge database:
https://www.veeam.com/kb1932

How the full backup is created on Friday depends on your job schedule. The full backup will contain the exact state of your files from the Fridays backup session (your weekly GFS schedule). We have two full backup types:

Active Full Backup
- We read the entire machine from the production storage and store it as a new full backup file

Synthetic Full Backup
- We create a incremental backup of the source machine. Then we synthesize a new full backup file from this new incremental backup data and unchanged data from previous full backup and incremental restore points.

To answer your question, it's option 2:
2) a backup that has just the files that existed at the time of the full
If you have any technical issues, please ask your service team to open a support case.

Best,
Fabian
Product Management Analyst @ Veeam Software
dgurrol
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Re: Are There any Merge Process Details

Post by dgurrol »

I appreciate the reply - no technical issues, I just think I need to ask for a change in backup policy. I would rather speak definitively so I appreciate your time!
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