Synthetic Backup schedule during day

[robertbelus]

Dear Veeam support,

I just want to ask, if there is any way to change schedule of automatic synthetic backup, which is running every midnight. In my case, I would rather have it during the day. I have RTO every 15 minutes, so i set an backup for every 15 minutes and daily synthetic backup.
Merging incrementals during synthetic backup causing alerts on our monitoring, which is expected but we would like to have them during the day.

Thank you in advance.

Best Regards
Robert

[david.domask]

Hi Robert,

Welcome to the forums!

Synthetic Fulls will execute on the first backup session of the day the Synthetic Full is scheduled. Unfortunately there is not a way to adjust this at this time.

Can I ask, what alerts are the Synthetic Fulls triggering that causes issues? RTO Violations I'm guessing? Consider targeting a repository with XFS or ReFS or any other repository type that benefits from Fast Clone, as this will help both with the size of Synthetic Fulls ("space-less"), and also the creation time.

[robertbelus]

Thank you David for confirmation, I thought that but better to be sure.

I am using vcenter snapshot utility for backuping vm. Also have trigger in monitoring, that if there is no new backup over 2 hours period, monitoring will alert it.
One incremental took about 5 min. and several incrementals merging during synthetic backup exceeded that 2 hours period.

Mentioned Fast Clone is interesting but have to do some PoC with that. Do you think, that fast clone is better solution than snapshoting?

[mjr.epicfail]

you can also leverage an active full, if that is faster

[robertbelus]

Active full took much more than Synthetic, so I decided to turn it off.

[david.domask]

Hi Robert,

You're welcome for the confirmation; as for your question, I think there is maybe a bit of terminology/feature confusion, so to be clear:

Fast Clone: This is a feature for repositories that store the backups which avoids the heavy IO requirements for a Synthetic Full and making metadata updates instead of full writes when creating a Synthetic Full. The end result is high space savings on the repository server storage and faster Synthetic Full creation. Check the User Guide link I referenced before for more details on how it works, but an XFS or ReFS based file system on your repository server is definitely a best bet if it's an option for you in the future.

Fast Clone won't change the actual processing of the source machine, whether you do a hypervisor snapshot based backup or use our Veeam Agents for in-guest backups, it just allows for faster synthetic operations on the repository.

[robertbelus]

Hello David,

Thanks for understandable explanation. I will definitely try in PoC that option to be able to compare both solutions.