Backup Copy and Synthetic Backups

[mihlfeld-it]

I'm trying to understand how backup copy jobs work when making periodic synthetic backups. I must be missing some documentation that explains what is copied. For the job in question, we run regular incremental backups every day and then create a synthetic backup weekly. My question is--what is copied when the backup copy job is run (which we would do nightly). Will it also copy the full synthetic full when it's made on the weekend? If so, this is a bit of a problem as this is going across a metered connection and we can't really afford to have it copying that full once a week. That's part of the reason we do synthetic fulls rather than active fulls--to avoid unnecessary bandwidth usage.

So bottom line question: are synthetic fulls copied over as part of backup copy jobs?

[chris.arceneaux]

Backup Copy jobs are designed to minimize the amount of traffic that needs to be copied between sites. While a Full backup is copied initially, subsequent backups copy job cycles only copy incremental changes of each restore point. To further reduce the amount of data transferred, deduplication & compression is used.

Given your need to make sure that Synthetic Fulls or Active Fulls are not copied. Make sure to leave the box in the screenshot below unchecked.



Reference Info:

• How Backup Copy Works

• Step 7. Define Backup Copy Target (see step #4)

[mihlfeld-it]

Fantastic, appreciate the information. I'll make sure that is setup for the Backup Copy job once I get it going so to make sure it's just incremental information copied over after the initial seed.