Fast clone with rotated USB drives?

[mvalpreda]

Does Fast Clone work with rotated USB drives? I just updated a server from 2012 R2 to 2016 and reformatted one of the rotated drives as ReFS. I set the job to do a synthetic full on Saturday night and saw this morning it was 8 hours into a synthetic full. The backup is a little more than 2TB and another ~110GB in incrementals. This drive is 4TB (reporting 3.63TB).....so it would not have room for another active full. Does the drive need to show more free space than a synthetic full would take.....even though it would not actually need the space?

[PTide]

Hi,

Does the drive need to show more free space than a synthetic full would take.....even though it would not actually need the space?

Not sure if I got it right, but I'll try to answer:

FastClone should work just fine with USB HDD. If it worked then if you add up all the sizes of all backup files you'll see that the number is smaller than Used Space in drive's properties. Can you see "[fast clone]" in the session statistics?

Thank you

[mvalpreda]

It did not do a Fast Clone. I'm thinking because after the initial backup and subsequent incrementals there was <1.5TB free on the drive. The full backup is just over 2TB, so there was not enough space reported by the drive to create a synthetic full even though it would not have needed the space. I have a 6TB drive offsite, I'll bring that in soon to test my theory.

[dellock6]

What's the frequency for rotating the disks? I suspect the fast clone has not been used because the chain is started anew at each rotation, so the blocks cannot be remapped.