Maximum Forever Forward Restore Points?

[ferrus]

We have a split strategy backup solution:
Tier 1 DAS storage, is simply a 30 day Forever Forward Incremental strategy, with no scheduled/synthetic fulls.
Tier 2 DataDomain, is GFS, 7 days, 4 weeks, 24 months - which merge into fulls on the device.

We have a bit more storage now, and the possibility to reduce the frequency of some backups and increase the frequency of others.

So my question is - what's the maximum safe number of Incremental Restore Points, in a Forever Forward chain?
I'm sure the recommendation for v8 was 30, I also thought I read it had increased in v9 - but I can't find links to either.

I'd like to be able to increase the number of RPs during the day, but still keep the same number of days.

[foggy]

Provided you're testing your backups and perform health checks, you can have virtually any number of restore points in a forever forward backup chain. Just consider some performance overhead in case of restore from the most recent points in case of a very long backup chain.

[ferrus]

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted.

Reading up on some of the linked threads - I didn't realise SureBackup was the recommendation, to reduce the frequency, or remove altogether Active Fulls - but I'm glad to hear it.
Having regular Full backups, Active or Synthetic - always seemed to neutralise the benefits of Forever Forward IMO. This should work much better.

Now I just have to work out the restore performance penalty ...

[foggy]

You can increase the frequency/number of restore points to the desired value and, when retention reaches it, perform test restores from the oldest and most recent restore points in the chain, to see whether the effect is noticeable in your particular environment.

[jisis]

Hi

I have a 4 bay Synology NAS and a Win 2016 server. I use ReFS formated local attached drive via iSCSI.
I would like to have incremental backups every 6th hour within 6am to 6pm. So 3 restore points each day for 30 days.
That means 90 RP in my 1st job.

Then I would like a copy job that saves 12 monthly RP and 3 yearly RP.

Is there any issues with having as many as 90 RP in a single job?

I have read the best practice without finding anything.

[foggy]

Hi Johan, please review the thread above for some considerations regarding the number of restore points in the chain. Thanks.

[jisis]

OK, so basically there are no best practices about the number of restore points, only that you regularly check your chain?

[foggy]

No best practices, since the number of restore points to keep is mostly defined by your data retention policy (how many days you need to keep backups). And it can also be affected by non-standard RPO, that is if you are required to make a few backups per day. Extremely long chains are not typically recommended, but 90 restore points chain is certainly fine and quite typical.

[jorgen.b]

Hi,
So what I can see here it is OK to run 90 RPs and only run Storage-level corruption guard test or is your recommendation Veeam DataLabs (SureBackup)runs at least once a month?

[foggy]

Hi Jörgen, using SureBackup to ensure VM recoverability is recommended regardless of the health check. Health check ensures the data on storage isn't corrupt, while SureBackup checks if VM in backup can be successfully booted and operates properly.

[MikeOCE35]

Hi,

When using a "Forever Forward Incremental Backup" i am curious if there are any limitations to having a large Retention Policy besides storage of course?
Currently some clients have a policy of 40 days for internal backups, if i were to increase this to 3 months, or 1 year etc what kind of issues can i expect, and is there some sort of sweet spot?

Also i guess i depends on how many incremental backups are done in a day also - some clients are daily, some are every 1-2 hours. (do these get consolidated?)

Apologies for the newbie questions, i am assisting coworkers from moving away from Shadowprotect setups to Veeam setups and i am still learning Veeam related processes.

Thanks!

[PetrM]

Hi Michael,

There are no "hard coded" limits for the number of restore points or days specified for short-term retention. The consolidation process happens if the number of days or restore points in the backup chain exceeds retention policy settings. By the way, I suggest to consider GFS-retention to manage monthly or yearly backups.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Hi Michael, also make sure you test your backups and perform periodic health checks to ensure backups recoverability - see above.

[MikeOCE35]

Thanks all.
@foggy - Yep we have monthly manual backup checks.