Switch to Forward Incremental (Forever Mode)

[Jack1874]

Guys, If I have been running a forward incremental (with a weekly active full)...can I switch the job to forward incremental (forever) without having to run a new active full.

[Jack1874]

I figured it out.. yes I can

[jamerson]

would like to know how

[Gostev]

You just switch the mode

[Jack1874]

Correct.. simply switch to the mode and the merge will happen at the end of specified retention...

[IHeartCats]

Hi,

We currently backup some large file servers to a dedicated repository using 4 dedicated jobs that use the forward incremental backup mode with an active full once a week which starts late Friday and runs over the weekend.
We need to use forward incremental as we have a continuous tape job that takes the daily incs and weekly onto offline media as they are produced. (We use reverse inc on all of our other servers but this doesn't work when you need to copy nightly to tape or you just end up with a full trying to goto tape every day)

We are currently configured to keep 8 restore points (notionally 1 week give or take a rerun) on disk. However due to the logic behind forward incremental we are ending up with 2 and sometimes 3 full backups on tape until all the incs in the chain that rely on it age out, now our repos are full and backups are failing.

I'm thinking of switching to forever forward incremental (eg stopping the weekly active fulls). It is my understanding from the veeam documentation that this means that veeam is more strict in the length of the backup chain it keeps and keeps injecting the oldest incremental into the oldest full backup once the chain reaches the configured lenghth. This means there should only ever be 1 full on disk (unless you manually run an active full). Please correct my logic if I have misunderstood.

Has anyone here ever made this switch? Did you come across any problems?

Does veeam preserve the existing chain on disk and start doing the transform on that? Do you know at what point in the backup job it would attempt this (eg do i need to run the backups manually today to start the space reduction process)?

Also regarding heath checking on a forever forward - should you be doing a health check on the backup file once a week? I saw some mention on other posts about the use of sure backup.

I have logged a case with support 02307572 for their advice on this but I wondered what the experience in the real world was too.

Apologies for the millions of quesitons but I'm a relative veeam newbie but the only one with any veeam skill at my place now so I need some people to bounce ideas off and support can't get back to me quick enough as I need to have a solution in 8 hrs so the backups don't fail again tonight!

Thanks
Helen

[PTide]

Hi,

Does veeam preserve the existing chain on disk and start doing the transform on that?

Yes, it does. The merge will happen accordingly with the retention settings.

Also regarding heath checking on a forever forward - should you be doing a health check on the backup file once a week?

That's not really necessary if you use SureBackup with Integrity Check option selected.

Thanks

[IHeartCats]

That's not really necessary if you use SureBackup with Integrity Check option selected.

Thanks for your reply.
So at the moment we don't use any sure backup jobs so I don't know anything about them. With that in mind I'm assuming the health check would be a sensible option?

Helen

[PTide]

Yes, health check will ensure that the most recent restore point is not corrupted, whereas SureBackup will actually check if the VM can be started + optionally will perform health check. Please see this article for more info.

Thanks