Frequency of active or synthetic full backup?

[TheBackupGuy]

Hey guys,

We have around 50 VM's that I am working on to be backed up. It's running on VMware ESXi. Veeam version is 9.5 on Windows server 2016 with dedupe enabled.

The backup target is Synology NAS with RAID 6. It provides around 7TB of space to be used. This volume is mapped using iSCSI initiator as drive.

So I am able to run daily incremental job without any issues which is good. However not sure about active full and synthetic backup and how frequently should it be run? The reason I am particularly asking is backup target (NAS) is not really fast storage.

Should i run active full or synthetic full periodically? And how frequently?

I am willing to take these full backups to ensure incremental chain is intact and restore is available when required.

thanks,

[Gostev]

Hi, Gary.

Normally, these are not required - however, some customers choose to do them for added peace of mind (or because of their data protection policy requires periodic fulls). There are plenty of existing discussions on this topic, please use the forum search if you want to read up additional details and opinions.

In your specific case however, I strongly recommend that you immediately switch to backing up to a volume that does not have Windows Server 2016 dedupe enabled and perform new full backups there, as the latter currently has known bugs that cause data corruption with large files.

Thanks!
Anton