Question regarding behavious or forever forward incremental.

[$username]

Hi there,

We're trying to determine the best method of backing up VMs are a remote site.

We're currently looking at doing forever forward incremental with a weekly active full.

Based on some research I have some conflicting information and am wanting to determine the behaviour.

If I had forever forward incremental with two restore points it should be

Monday - Full, Tuesday - Inc, Wednesday - Inc gets injected to Monday full becoming new full, Thursday - Inc, so and so forth.

Now if I did it with a weekly active full would the previous full continue to move forward as described until the the synthetic full and the active full are back to back and then be trimmed off or would the first full exist, have incs between that full and the next active full with no forward movement?

[skrause]

In your scenario (2 restore points set in the job), when you run the active full it will not delete the old full+last increment until you have the number of restore points that you have set for retention in the new chain. Which, in your scenario would be the day after the active full when its Incremental is complete.

If you are doing a full every week anyway, why not just run it as a regular forward incremental job with 7 points of retention? That way you have no transform operations at all. Forever Forward is really meant to be for situations where you rarely if ever run an active full backup. If you have enough disk space to have, at some point, 2 full backups and a set of incrementals between them then you really would be better served by just running a normal weekly Forward Incremental chain with it set to run an active full once a week.

[foggy]

Basically, once you enable any type of periodic fulls (either active or synthetic), forever forward becomes a regular forward incremental without any merge. In other words, forever forward incremental is not possible with scheduled periodic fulls.

[$username]

If you are doing a full every week anyway, why not just run it as a regular forward incremental job with 7 points of retention? .

At the remote sites we have very limited additional space so right now we're trying to squeeze everything we can out of it, right now we only have room for the full and a few incrementals but not enough for a full and seven days of incremental.

We will add more storage down the road allowing us increased flexibility but right now we're just trying to achieve some local back up with centrally hosted long term backups.

[foggy]

Then don't enable periodic full backups, just use forever forward incremental mode until you get additional space.

[$username]

If we did that wouldn't we risk potential corruption of the incrementals?

Then if we're doing backup copy jobs couldn't that affect the whole chain and the centralized copies?

[foggy]

If we did that wouldn't we risk potential corruption of the incrementals?

We recommend to use SureBackup for recoverability testing and perform active fulls manually from time to time, if required.

Then if we're doing backup copy jobs couldn't that affect the whole chain and the centralized copies?

No, backup copy jobs do not affect regular backup jobs.