Changing plans from reverse incremental to forward

[mephisto]

Hi guys

I'm planning to change some backup jobs that I have from reverse incremental to forward incremental as I'm seeing always the storage as the bottleneck during the backups.

Does forward incremental suffer from fragmentation when the incremental is merged into the full backup file?

Should I actually expect a huge performance gain moving from reverse to forward incremental?

Thanks!

[foggy]

You're talking about new forward incremental forever, right? Then it indeed puts less load on target storage, fragmentation can be eliminated with the help of periodic active fulls.

[mephisto]

You're talking about new forward incremental forever, right? Then it indeed puts less load on target storage, fragmentation can be eliminated with the help of periodic active fulls.

Do you mean there is a new type of forward incremental forever? I thought this was already in place for some time? Well, to be honest I never used it because I liked more the idea of having the latest file as the full backup which normally works well, but I need to compare them as my storage devices are not coping well. Always 90% busy, but the storage is very capable of doing 1000+MB sec sequential writes.

I do periodic active full, but to be honest it runs fine for 1 or 2 weeks and then it gets sluggish again.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, this type was introduced in version 8. It works similar to forward incremental backup mode, but it does not require synthetic/active fulls.