Active full backups - digest 18th March

[cby]

Gostev

Interesting history on active full backups.

I may have missed a trick but there is one area that's worth mentioning where one-off active fulls are rather useful.

We recently upgraded from enterprise to enterprise plus to take full advantage of scale-out backup repos for 1100+ VMs. As you know SOBR by default applies per-VM backups in order to make the most efficient use of backup storage space. This has really helped with all the new jobs we've created.

However, in our case we had numerous old forever incremental backup jobs which had multiple VMs that were written as a single large backup (.vbk & .vibs). The disadvantage with these large backups was the long time to merge once the retention period was reached (fast-clone nothwithstanding). Also we did not have time to re-create the jobs where per-VM would have been applied.

In order to 'convert' from the single backup made up of multiple VMs to a per-VM output we ran a one-off active full. Admittedly some of the larger VMs took a few hours and naturally free backup space had to be available while the active full was running.

Anyway, net result is that we now have per-VM backups across our infrastructure.

Was there another way to achive this without running active full backups on the old jobs?

[foggy]

No, switch to per-VM chains requires active full anyway.