Synthetic Full Backup Retention Question

[jamessa]

If I am understanding this correctly, if I start a new Job on Sunday with Saturday being the day I create a Synthetic Fulls and have my retention set to 13 days I will essentially have the original Full VBK backup and 2 additional Full VBK Synthetic Backups? I really only want no more than 2 full VBK files at a time but I do not want to set my retention to below 5 to achieve this. Is the only way around this to Transform previous full backups?

Thanks

[Alexey D.]

Hello Jamie,

Given 13 points for retention, you will generally have 2 synthetic fulls on disk, and in some days - 3. This happens because incremental passes "cannot survive" without their "parent" full backup. And in order to preserve retention policy, B&R has to keep a full chain even if a part of this chain is no longer needed.

Please refer to this topic for further explanation how things work: Rollback points and full backups

In your case, you can use Transform or switch to Reverse Incremental mode. Hope it helps!

[jamessa]

Alexey,

First thanks for your response!

Second,

If I go the route of Forward incremental with synthetic fulls and transform, will this work with the Linux agents if I backup to a Linux OS in a different site?

[Alexey D.]

Jamie, yes, this should work and I don't see any drawbacks.