Is there a VIB during Synthetic creation?

[howartp]

Due to an unrelated issue, our backups didn't run for a week or so. That is now resolved.

At that time, we ran incremental Mon-Fri with synthetic full on Fridays.
We have a secondary destination to tape.

Due to the missing backups, we had 8 incremental VIBs instead of the 4, and the Synthetic is therefore taking 5-6 days instead of 2-3. Also the tape backup doesn't run until the synthetic finishes.

During synthetic creation, the subsequent days incrementals don't run and leave us with no up-to-date backups; therefore last week I cancelled the synthetic and moved it to Saturday so that we at least had a Friday VIB. Of course this now means I have 17 incrementals, synthetic is taking even longer, and i'm running out of disk space.

Right now my last usable backup on disk or tape is 5 days old. Synthetic is 83% complete having started 11pm Saturday evening.

2 questions:

1) Presumably synthetic creation takes a form of incremental backup before it starts converting it into a VBK? If so, can it drop that VIB to disk so we can back it up to tape whilst we await the VBK?
2) Can Veeam not block the creation of further incrementals whilst a synthetic is running? Incremental is only "Today minus Last Incremental" so there's no data issues; the last incremental is still on disk for another week even after synthetic, so neither is affected by doing this. You could then perform your forward-transform process to re-seed the newer VIBs against the synthetic once it has finished, and allow deletion of the now-orphaned incrementals.
3) Can I execute a synthetic against a set of VBK/VIBs from Powershell, rather than the job itself doing it?

Peter

[foggy]

Hi Peter, yes, before starting synthetic full, VeeamB&R creates a regular incremental backup and begins synthetic after that. Incremental is stored in the repository like any other one and can be copied to tape. As for the other two questions, this is currently not possible but we're working in that direction. Thanks!