Changing backup type

[infused]

Hi Guys.

I currently do a forward incremental while each week creating a synthetic full. The synthetics are old habits which refuse to die But I am having storage issues (huge amount of space)...

A quick question or two

1. Forever incrementals. Do I ever have to worry about the original full backup becoming corrupt for any reason? Veeam crashes, backup fails for some reason etc. This is the main reason I do synthetics. It just scares the crap out of me Suggestions on retention periods for forever incremental?

2. When changing the backup type from say reverse to forward, does anything special need to be done in Veeam, or is it fancy enough to work that out?

I'm also on Veeam 7. I see Veeam 8 has a new way on handling this?

[Gostev]

Hi

1. Absolutely, as storage corruptions are very common. This is exactly the reason why you need to follow 3-2-1 rule of backup, and make at least 1 copy of your backups to a different storage device.

2. The job will work it out.

v8 adds the new space efficient forever-incremental backup mode, please check out the What's New document for more info.

Thanks!
Anton

[jlester]

Anton,

On the Forever Incremental setup, it says to turn off synthetic and active fulls. We use Reverse Incremental and the advice was always to do Active Fulls ever so often. With Forever Incremental, we don't need to worry about that now?

[Gostev]

Well, same answer - you should worry if you are not copying your backups with a Backup Copy job (which has built-in integrity check specifically for detecting storage corruption).

Those Active Full recommendations are coming from early B&R days. Backup Copy was designed from ground up to run over WAN, where Active Fulls are absolutely impossible, so we ensured it has all the required capabilities built-in to address all the reasons why we have previously recommended our customers to do periodic Active Fulls.