Periodic full backups. Are they "verify" jobs?

[glemmestad]

Just a question:
How do periodic full backups work? Do they start a new .vbk, like when you rightclick on a job and go Perform Full Backup?
Or do they just do a "verify" against the data that's already in the .vbk (plus save incremental changes, like a normal incremental)? Without creating a new .vbk?

[Gostev]

Even, it is the same when you rightclick on a job and go Perform Full Backup. New VBK is created, and whole VMs data is retrieved from source (instead of reconstructing synthetic full). As a part of this process, VBK gets "cleaned up" from data blocks belonging to VMs which are no longer present in the job.

Some customers wanted this functionality because they did not feel comfortable with forever-incremental backups. Right now you can only make this weekly, but in the release version there will also be "monthly" option (default selection).

Periodic fulls will be disabled by default, because this request was not too common, besides we now have automatic storage integrity check at the beginning of each job run that would signal about backup corruption (if it is even possible with the transactional VBK/VRB storage).

[tsightler]

I'm still having a hard time understanding this feature. How exactly does it work? It this what you're calling "incremental" backup? When I use the feature to create a new VBK every Sunday, does this VBK get modified every day (with VBR files for rollbacks) or are the VBR files actually written as true incremental changes to the Sunday VBK? In other words, is the current VBK file still modified every day?

[Gostev]

Basically, it creates completely new VBK chain. Just so this is easier to realize: this is like deleteing old job abd creating new job while pointing it to the same location as the old one. Location will still have the old "abandoned" chain, but other than that the job basically starts its regular synthetic backup logic "from scratch".

Of course in reality there's no "abandoned" chain - older files are still being processed with automatic retention policy, and you still see them in restore dialog as "valid" points you can restore from.

Does it make sense?

[tsightler]

I think I understand, however, based on this description, it doesn't appear that this feature does anything to address the problem for those of us that need to get Veeam files to tape every day which is very disappointing for my use case. When you indicated that the next version would have "true incremental" I interpreted that as incremental similar to tape backups or vRanger where changes are writting to a new tape segment or disk file and the "full" backup is not touched. Instead the feature appears to be just a scheduled "rebase" of the synthetic backup already in place. This means, to have my current backups on tape I still need to backup both the latest VBK and the newest VBR file EVERY NIGHT, exactly the problem that already causes us grief.

[Gostev]

Yes, that is correct - it is not designed to address the issue you are talking about. As I indicated in our original discussion about regular inc/dif backups here, we are planning to deliver this as the following minor product update by the end of this year.

[tsightler]

OK, I got it. I guess I was confused with all of the different features and exactly what feature was what. Sorry about that. I look forward to that feature greatly so I guess I was too excited when 4.0 beta came out I thought that was it. I'll try to be patient (not one of my best character traits) and keep testing the cool stuff in 4.0.

[mdornfeld]

I tried to read through all of the other posts to catch up...

A lot of the servers that I'll be doing backups of, I'll be doing on a 2 - 4 hour basis every day. If I select to have to have a periodic full backup done on, say, a Saturday, will it try to run a full backup every couple of hours on the Saturday, or only the first time it runs on Saturday?

[Gostev]

Matt, only the first time it runs on Saturday.

[Gostev]

This thread was moved here from the closed beta forum.