Reverse Increment vs Increment

[zadrian]

I know this topic of "Reverse Increment vs Increment" have been discussed many times....but recently I have seen that Increment was "recommended" in VBR instead of Reverse Increment.
Then there are also "days" where we can create the synthetic full backup.

Here is my Backup Job (VBR for VMware)
- Backup (Reverse Increment) runs every 2 hourly from 0800-0000 hrs
- Backup Repository uses a Synology NAS with 6 RAID 5 SSDs
- Time taken : Processing approx 3 min, HDD1 : approx 2 min, HDD3 : approx 4 min, data transfer and creation of Synthetic full approx 78 min (whole process starts like 0800 & ends at approx 0914 or max 0928).
- Backup copy (to DR site) kicks in at approx 0818 and ends approx 0827

Qn1. If we convert to Increment backups, we have several backups throughout the day, which would the Synthetic Full backup run ? Can the Synthetic full be forced to run at 0600 hrs or at 0000 hrs ?
Qn2. If we convert to Increment backups, can we set the max number of synthetic full backup copies (eg to retain 7 days worth of backup but run synthetic full once per day) ?

[david.domask]

Hi zadrian,

1. As per the User Guide, the Synthetic Full will only be created on the first run of the day when the Synthetic Full should be created. So if you have a run that starts around the 00:00 mark, then that one will produce the Synthetic Full.
2. You can configure GFS if you want to keep multiple Full copies for archival purposes, or consider creating a Backup Copy Job with the primary job as a source for GFS retention (or both, no problems with extra copies ) I'm not quite sure I understand this question correctly as you write "max number of Synthetic Full backups" -- GFS would handle this, and I think this is primarily what you are looking for. The job will use the Forward Incremental backup mode, so you will need to plan to ensure that you have space for the backup set. Our calculators here can assist with your repository planning.

Thanks!