Move Forever Forward Incremental Backup chains to SOBR

[danieledrago]

Hello everyone,

I am migrating backups to a new Scale-out Backup Repository which has an S3 storage as the capacity tier.
I have configured the SOBR to move backups older than 7 days to the object storage.



As far as I understand, you can only move inactive backup chains to the Capacity Tier.
This means Forever Forward Incremental Backup chains will never be moved.

Is that correct, or am I missing something?
Am I forced to use periodic full backups?

Thank you in advance.
Daniele

[david.domask]

Hi Daniele,

You are correct, only inactive chains are moved to Capacity Tier as described in the User Guide link.

Some periodic full backup, either Active or Synthetic is recommended here for move operations, and consider that you can also use Object Storage repositories as Performance tier as well, removing the need for Capacity Tier in many cases. Since I can see capacity tier looks to be targeting an S3 bucket from a Synology box, I'm guessing you have performance tier as some volume from the same Synology, am I correct? If so, I would advise consider if there's really a need for the copy/move operation if it's going to the same storage ultimately, as it's just excess processing to move the data around on the same server.

If your backup plans require this tiering, that's fine, consider checking if you can configure an XFS or ReFS volume from the share to get Fast Clone capabilities. With Fast Clone and Synthetic Fulls, you'll get "spaceless" full backups and reduce your on-disk foot print while benefiting from the Move operations as expected.

[danieledrago]

Hi David,

thank you for your answer.

Actually, our performance tier in this case is a local folder on the same server where VBR is installed. This server is also used as a backup repository where we initially keep backups before moving older files to the Synology object storage.

[david.domask]

Got it, then in that case you can ignore that part of the suggestion, just wasn't immediately clear if it Performance and Capacity tier were hosted on the same server or not and wanted to advise a way to avoid needless cpu cycles

But otherwise, your understanding is correct, and the suggestions above should help with your planning. Similarly, consider that Copying to Capacity Tier does not have the same requirement, but Copying will not reclaim the space on Performance Tier.

[danieledrago]

Great! Thanks again for your precious advice