Reverse Incremental backups?

[stevecous]

I am having problems with backup times on our weekly full backups and am looking into the reverse inc backups. We run the forward incremental over the rest of the week.

Would the last reverse incremental in theory be a full backup image?
Will the reverse inc take a simalar amount of time as the full backup?


Thanks
Steve.

[dellock6]

Hi Steve,
the last reverse incremental IS a full backup.
About the time taken, reverse incremental keeps less the a complete full since it takes only modified data since the last one and injects them into the previous reserve. But keep in mind, reverse incremental is I/O intensive on the backup storage and uses random access on storage.
Best bet is to test it for a couple of runs and check timings.

[stevecous]

Thanks

I had remembered that one of our veeam servers is running as reverse incrementals and we are seeing simalar times for backups. I am away that we have a performance issue in regards to our disk repository. I have heard that NFS might make a difference. Do you think there is anything in this, is it worth persuing?

Thanks
Steve

[dellock6]

I have never made a comparison between NFS or CIFS from the same storage, so I cannot tell you if Veeam can better use NFS than CIFS, maybe someone else would.
To design your backup storage to receive reverse incremental, you need first to find out how many IOPS you can get from your backup storage, try and run some backups to see how many IOPS you can send to it, and calculate how much time it will take to complete a backup; and obviously evaluate if this backup windows is right for your business.