Backing up to S3

[NEM4EVER]

Hi,

I need a second opinion on the following setup - hope somebody can help

What we do now:
Backup VM's from our SAN to a dedicated Veeam storage server using direct backup (DC). The backup method is Reversed incremental.

What we need to accomplish:
Copy our daily backups from the Veeam server to S3 (we have a file based backup solution and a 1 Gbit connection to Amazon EU in place for this).

I have been running a test with above for the past month - i.e. I changed the backup method for the jobs to forever incremental (with conversion once a week).
This works pretty well (transfer speed to S3 is approx. 300-400 Mbit) but I am a Little bit nervous about using forever incremental without active full backups.

Anyone been doing forever incremental for a long period of time (without doing active fulls) - and then do restore tests?

[foggy]

Ulrik, periodic active fulls are indeed recommended, please see this thread for more details: How often do I need a full backup?

If you are already doing weekly synthetic fulls, then you can enable monthly active full instead of one of them and this will not increase the amount of traffic to be transferred to the cloud by your file-based solution (if that is you concern).

[NEM4EVER]

Thanks foggy,

I already do incremental with synthetic fulls every week (to keep the chain lenghts between full backups down) - I will add an monthly full backup, so there is a full
copy of the original data for each month. Veeam will use this full backup for future incrementals right?

[foggy]

Correct, new backup chain is started with the active full.