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squebel
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Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by squebel »

I did some searching and reading but wasn't finding the exact answer. So, as the title of this thread says, can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Ex) I do an Active Full of a vm only once each month and keep 3 restore points. Let's assume very little data changes between backup runs. Will I actually consume space equal to the Full x 3 or will there be space savings from ReFS block cloning that will basically be the original Full plus some changed data?
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Mildur »

Hi squebel

No, Active Full do not use block cloning. You need the space of 3x full backups.
Why? Because Active Full backup read and backups every block from the source disk and writes all of them in a new full backup file.

A Synthetic Full backup would just backup changed blocks from the source disc and leverages unchanged blocks from the backup repository to build a new full backup file. There the Block Cloning API is used to just reference the blocks instead of writing them again on the backup disk.

The supported processes are documented here. Only synthetic full backups are mentioned.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Thanks
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by squebel »

Thanks, Fabian. I figured that was the case but because it wasn't specifically noted anywhere like, "does NOT work for Active Fulls", I wanted to ask. Thank you!

For my example, where vm can only be backed up once per month (customer's directive), and we want to take advantage of block cloning, what would be your recommended job configuration?
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Mildur »

Synthetic full backups can only be done on a daily or weekly schedule. With just monthly full backups, there is no block cloning.

If you can convince your customer todo at least weekly backups, it can be configured.

Update:
Regnor‘s idea will also work.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Regnor » 1 person likes this post

With a monthly backup synthetic fulls should still be possible. Just configure synthetic fulls for the same day, you'll run the monthly backup; Veeam will create a synthetic full on that day. At least from my understanding as I rarely configure monthly jobs. From a storage perspective, if you only have a small change rate, daily vs monthly backups won't matter much.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Mildur »

Good point @Regnor
Worth a try.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Regnor » 1 person likes this post

Regnor wrote: Sep 16, 2022 6:45 am With a monthly backup synthetic fulls should still be possible. Just configure synthetic fulls for the same day, you'll run the monthly backup; Veeam will create a synthetic full on that day. At least from my understanding as I rarely configure monthly jobs. From a storage perspective, if you only have a small change rate, daily vs monthly backups won't matter much.
Verified in lab that it will work :)
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by squebel »

@Regnor and @Mildur,

What I can see, in my job configuration is that even though the schedule is set to only run once a month, the Synthetic Full is only configurable to run on a day of the week. I'm seeing that the job will run every week on Saturday and confirmed that that is how it operates. Only an Active Full are you allowed to define which day of the month you want it to run.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Regnor »

If your job is configured to run on Saturday once per month, then also configure the Synthetic Full for Saturday. If your job runs on a specific date, then just enable the Synthetic Full for every day.
It will only create the Full, if your job is executed.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by squebel »

That's how I have it set up but the synthetic full is running every Saturday, not just on the last Saturday of the month as I have specified in the schedule. If that is not how it is intended to work, I can open a case. However, I have a feeling, based on reading other older posts around this topic that it is working as intended because monthly synthetic fulls are not recommended.
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Re: Can Active Fulls take advantage of ReFS space savings?

Post by Regnor »

That's odd, because the Synthetic Full schedule itself shouldn't execute the job. I'll try that again in my lab.
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