Help me understand synthetic backups and tapes

[john.aubrey]

Hello,
I'll start with my goal: Nightly backups M-F of our servers. Saturday i want Friday's backups to write to the tape so that if I need to restore a server, it will return the whole server to what it looked like Friday at backup time.

I have jobs set up for nightly, I have Incremental (Recommened) selected, then "Create Synthetic Full Backups Periodically", this needs set for Friday right? Then on Saturday morning it will pull the full "Synthetic" Friday backups to tape?

[soncscy]

Hey John,

If your Primary (source for tape) jobs make periodic fulls, there is no Virtual Full. Virtual Full is only used when your source jobs are Forever Forward Incremental (because logically, the increments backed up wouldn't match the initial full backed up to tape).

So, if you're making Synthetic Fulls, just make sure your Backup to Tape job runs after your Synthetic full is made.

In your example, if the Synthetic Full is made on Friday, then year, as long as it's done by Saturday before the tape job, it should be backed up from my experience.

[john.aubrey]

thanks! I think we are set now for this kind of backup.