How often do I need a full backup?

[foggy]

I wasn't aware that this was a recommendation given reverse incremental, I thought Veeam had such integrity checks that it could verify that the latest/full copy in the chain is always correct. Assuming the underlying storage is solid, of course.

Probably, another existing thread will justify this recommendation for you.

In saying that, I don't know how Veeam behaves when this sort of issue occurs... What If the veeam server dies mid way through a full backup? If you only have one backup, is that backup now corrupt?

There is some level of redundancy in the backup file and how it is updated, so Veeam B&R always knows where the "good" data is, even in case of such a failure. This is also covered in the topic referred to above.

[trackstar]

Hello,

I just created two new backup jobs. I really don't want to enable Active Full (trying to avoid traffic if possible). Am I okay without the Active Full and not worried for corruption if someday I need to do a restore. For exchange backup, I do enable active full backup once a month since data is more critical.

Backup job1 (7 restore points):

-incremental (monday - friday)
- Saturday (synthetic full)
(about 90 servers)

Backup job2 (31 restore points):
- incremental (monday-saturday)
- Sunday (synthetic full)
- once the backup is done, will copy full backup to directory for tape backup.
(about 10 servers)

[foggy]

Please review considerations above and in the topics referred, should clarify the importance of periodic active fulls for you. Feel free to ask any additional questions, if required.

[samuk]

Hi Question..

I am running Incremental s with Synthetic full every Friday. (with one full backup file)

Can i set the restore points to 14?

will i have 14 restore points and 1 full on disk after 2 weeks before the 1st restore point is over written

Thanks
Sam

[foggy]

Sam, please look at this topic for thorough explanation on how retention works with forward incremental mode. Basically, if you set 14 restore points with daily backups and weekly fulls, you will have from 14 to 21 restore points on disk with 2 or 3 fulls, depending on the day of the week.

[stewsie]

Hi

Is there a recommended frequency for Incremental backups when either an active or synthetic full should be taken?

Thanks

[wishr]

Hi Paul,

I believe there is no definitive answer to this question. It depends on your corporate backup policy that should be developed with Always ON approach in mind (please do not forget about the 3-2-1 rule). When planning and developing a backup strategy it's recommended to assess your workloads and build some sort of an inventory where your applications are shown along with the business processes they power on.

Basically, the frequency of Incremented backups depends on your recovery goals, especially RPO and RTO you'd like to achieve within your organization.

Before going to the Active Full/Synthetic Full part of the question it's absolutely necessary to understand the difference between those two. After that I would recommend you to take a look at our Best Practices portal section regarding Backup Methods.

Due to the nature of Active Full and Synthetic Full backups most likely it won't be possible to run them very frequently, especially if you have a lot of workloads. On the other hand, you'd like to be sure that DR is possible and you are able to recover your workloads in the desired time period. That's why you should have a VBK taken/created frequently and stored securely - that's where Active Full and Synthetic Full backups are able to help, on the other hand if you use Sure Backup and have limited Repository resources you may not require to run both Synthetic or Active Fulls.

There is a bunch of similar discussions on our forums. Please take a quick look and feel free to ask additional questions.

Thanks!

P.S. We've merged your question with a similar existing thread. Definitely recommend taking a look at the first pages.

[stewsie]

Thanks for the update

I was interested to see if incremental backups without another full would become fragmented over time leading to performance problems

[foggy]

Fragmentation effect can be eliminated with the help of periodic full backup compact operations.