Incremental and Synthetic Full Questions

[wocomike]

Hi All,

I had been doing reversed incremental backups for quite some time now. Recently, we've had a need to replicate the data offsite to a DR Site. Because of this, I have switched my backups to incremental, creating synthetic fulls every Friday, and rolling previous synthetic fulls into one.

If I set the option to roll my synthetic fulls into one file, shouldn't I have just 1 VBK file? I have multiple VBK's, and this is eating up a huge amount of disk space.

Then I received this error early this morning:


-----------------------
Transforming previous full backup chain into rollbacks
Patch failed
Client error: There is not enough space on the disk
Failed to write data to the file [E:\vmware_backup\7 Day Retention2011-03-18T145852.vbk].

Server error: End of file

------------------------


Are my VBK's still OK?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Gostev]

Hi, yes you should only have 1 VBK with the above settings (I assume you are saying you have transform option enabled). Please contact technical support for troubleshooting. Thanks.

[wocomike]

I just sent a note to support about this.

It looks like the other times it attempted to create synthetic fulls, there was a disk space issue. I wonder if that's why it didn't roll them into one?

Does it need a certain amount of available space for the rollup?

[Gostev]

That's right, disk space issue will prevent roll up from completing successfully. You may want to re-create the job and start from scratch.

[wocomike]

I'd hate to recreate the routine, as I've got many weeks worth of backups on it.

Is it ok if I just add more space to the LUN, and then let the backups resume? Should the VBK's consolidate next week?

[Gostev]

I believe there is an issue in 5.0.1 that in some cases, failed transform may prevent VM recovery from backup down the road (I've seen this listed as fixed in 5.0.2). So to be on the safe side, I would recommend to recreate the job.