Feature Request : Veeam Reverse Incremental or rolling synthetic full

[zadrian]

Can Veeam bring back reverse incremental ? Or at least have some feature to create a "rolling" synthetic full ?

If we perform Reverse incremental or Incremental, at the end of each backup, a increment file is created. But also a synthetic full backup is created where for Incremental Backup is at the furthest tail end but for Reverse incremental is at the nearest end.
- In Incremental (example 5 days retention) we would have day 1 to day 5 increment, synthetic full backup as of day 5
- In Reverse Incremental (example 5 days retention) we would have day 1 to day 5 increment, synthetic full backup as of day 1

The truth of the matter is how often would people rather use the data from latest backup vs the need to use backup from like 5 days or 7 days or even 30 days ago ?
.....

Then second request for rolling synthetic full ?
There is a current option of creating synthetic full based on days of the week (example Monday - Sunday). But that you take up a serious amount of storage and also it takes a lot of effort to clean up all the full backups.

So maybe as a alternative derived from the "old" reverse incremental, after the increment backup job completes, could there be a supplement job that updates the current synthetic full instead of just creating another one ?

[Mildur]

Hi zadrian

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that we are bringing it back.

But that you take up a serious amount of storage and also it takes a lot of effort to clean up all the full backups.

May I ask, what kind of repository type you have in use?

We recommend using FastClone-supported repository types for almost spaceless and efficient synthetic full backups.

Best,
Fabian

[zadrian]

I am using Synology NAS FS2500 with dual 10Gbps and dual 1Gbps NICs on RAID 5 Synology Enterprise 7TB SSDs (12 SSDs).

To be precise, if we backup a 1.5 TB VM (for example file server), with Reverse Incremental, it would create a synthetic full backup (approx 1TB .vbk on latest backup)) and 30 increments (approx 1GB .vib).
But if we use Forward Incremental, it would create 30 increments (approx 1GB .vib) and a synthetic full backup (approx 1TB .vbk on the oldest backup).

However the difference when we need to recover, with Reverse Increment, it is so much faster as most often we would use the latest backup. But with Forward Increment, it would take a very long time to get data from the latest backup.

So the workaround advised was to create a synthetic full backup periodically (daily or at least Mon, Wed, Fri). Then we would be having 30 or 15 synthetic full backup sets respectively.
Then I would need to somehow write a script to delete the synthetic full backup sets to keep 1 or 2 latest and the "oldest" (required by forward incremental backup)